The Globe reports Baker’s lead over Coakley is the result of independents' movement. Poll: Baker leads Coakley in Mass.

For the first time in the Boston Globe’s weekly tracking poll, Republican Charlie Baker holds a significant lead over Democrat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts gubernatorial race, 45 percent to 36 percent.

The poll, first posted Thursday night, is the first showing the race as anything but a near tie in recent weeks. Last week’s Globe poll showed the candidates neck-and-neck, as did a separate tracking survey this week from WBUR-FM, conducted by the MassINC Polling Group.


Baker’s lead in the Globe poll is the result of movement of independents into his column, the Globe reports.

The Boston Globe poll was conducted Oct. 19-22 by SocialSphere, Inc., surveying 500 likely voters by live-telephone interview. (SocialSphere also conducted the web-based POLITICO Poll this year.) The margin of error is plus-or-minus 4.4 percentage points.

( See more from POLITICO’s Polling Center)

Coakley’s camp was quick to dismiss the result as an outlier. “[T]he Globe poll is the only public poll to show such intense volatility in the race for Governor, going from Baker up 3 three weeks ago to Coakley up 5 two weeks ago, to even last week and Baker up 9 this week. Every other public poll has shown a very stable campaign with very little movement over the past month,” said Coakley aide Doug Rubin in a statement, who added that the campaign’s internal polls show a margin-of-error contest.

Last Thursday night, the Coakley-aligned Massachusetts Independent Expenditure PAC released a poll conducted by the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, showing Coakley and Baker essentially tied among likely voters.

Coakley, the commonwealth’s attorney general, is best remembered for losing to Republican Scott Brown in a special Senate election in Jan. 2010 to fill the seat of the late Edward Kennedy. Baker, a former health care CEO, was the GOP nominee for governor in 2010, when he lost to the Democratic incumbent, Deval Patrick.