New Poll has Romney Up Slightly

The AP reported yesterday that Governor Mitt Romney has regained the lead on Attorney General Tom Reilly in a recent poll. Opinion Dynamics surveyed 410 registered voters on behalf of Mass Insight Corp and came up with the following results:

	October	July
Romney	41%	34%
Reilly	37%	40%

Good news for Romney? Not really. These numbers are roughly in line with just about every poll we've seen. While obviously Democrats would like to see Reilly beating the Governor, the fact that Romney is consistently around 40% in the polls can't be encouraging. He's the incumbent, and any incumbent that can't break 50% is in trouble. In all the polling we've seen, Romney hasn't gotten a majority except when polled against Deval Patrick, and even then not recently. It's true, however, that Romney's rise in the polls is statistically significant, but that 34% could also just be an outlier. We generally have not seen his numbers that low in other polls.

Of course, we're getting closer and closer to Mitt's self-imposed "technically Fall ends on December 21st" deadline for his reelection announcement. At this point, it would be a surprise if he announced he was running for another term, but maybe his failure to achieve any legislative vicories will cause him to put his presidential ambitions on hold until he's got a second term under his belt. In any event, if the GOP candidate in 2006 is not Romney, it will likely be Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, who Reilly leads in this poll by a margin of 45% to 27%. The poll also reports the favorable/unfavorable ratings of the potential candidates:

	Favorable	Unfavorable	No Opinion
Mitt Romney	50%	41%	9%
Tom Reilly	45%	21%	34%
Kerry Healey	34%	24%	42%
Deval Patrick	18%	6%	80%

No surprises here, Romney has the highest unfavorables and favorables, Reilly has a decent net favorable/unfavorable rating, and Healey is mostly unknown, but not as much as newcomer Deval Patrick, who still has work to do to get his name known.