Since the New Year, Scott Brown has been on a clear winning streak. How Scott Brown got his mojo back

Scott Brown’s got his groove back.

A string of recent polling, an agreement to bar outside money from the race and some savvy legislative moves have put Democrats on notice that ousting the first-term Massachusetts Republican will be anything but easy, even with a first-class challenger.


Six months after Elizabeth Warren burst into the Senate race as the heroine of the left and swiftly leapfrogged Brown in polling and buzz, her superstar candidacy has plummeted back to earth.

It’s now Brown whose gotten a lift in this marquee match-up, and observers on both sides of the aisle credit the candidate for the turnaround.

“I think what’s helping him is he’s conveying that he’s more moderate than what people assumed,” said Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, a veteran of two classic Massachusetts Senate races in 1994 and 1996. “He’s given the sense that if you asked him about the tea party, he’d say, ‘What are you talking about?’ He’s become much more of a Massachusetts Republican in the tradition of [Bill] Weld.”

“A lot of the moves he’s making are smart. They’re strategic. After the rise of Warren, things have settled and we’ve realized it’s going to be a tough race,” said a senior Democratic Senate operative based in Washington who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

The last three public surveys in the race placed Brown 5 to 9 points ahead of Warren and he’s maintained an approval rating in the high 40s. That’s a marked shift from the afterglow of Warren’s announcement in late fall, when polls showed the contest deadlocked or tilted in her favor.

Dan Payne, a longtime Bay State political consultant who has worked for Sen. John Kerry and Reps. Barney Frank and John Tierney, echoed the sentiment from Boston.

“The issues brought up are issues favoring Brown. He’s been getting the campaign to be on his turf. He seems to be the one bringing the fight to her,” Payne said. “He’s very smart about politics, if not about policy, and I think Democrats are a little perplexed by this phenomenon saying, ‘How did this happen?’”

Since the New Year, the 52-year-old Brown has been on a clear winning streak.

His move at the State of the Union urging President Obama to nudge Majority Leader Harry Reid to push through his insider trading bill was not only a shrewd moment captured on national cable television — it worked. A week later, the Stock Act sailed through the Senate by a 96-3 vote, granting Brown a rare bipartisan policy win during an election year.

That came just two months after Brown appeared with the president at a White House signing ceremony to an enact the withholding tax repeal, a key portion of Obama’s job package that he authored.

The payroll tax cut extension compromise that Brown blasted House Republicans for delaying became law in February.

“He’s done a good job at threading the needle so far, picking and choosing his spots to paint a more moderate face than he in fact is,” said Jim Manley, a longtime advisor to Sens. Reid and Ted Kennedy.

Even during the contraception debate, Brown appeared to gain respect for his support for a conscience clause exemption, garnering praise from former Boston Democratic Mayor Ray Flynn.

Then there’s the sheer politics, which even Democrats acknowledge, Brown’s team has mastered.

With outside liberal groups unquestionably prioritizing this race as their top target, the agreement to sideline super PACs was a coup for Brown’s team. Because he’s sitting on a $13 million war chest, it’s Warren who would benefit more from outside assistance in an attempt to reach parity.

“It’s a settling of the race to where people have gotten the chance to reflect on the candidates without outside advertising,” said Brown campaign manager Jim Barnett.

The agreement works by requiring the candidates to pay fines each time an outside group acts on their behalf.

When word dropped last week that an obscure conservative political action committee began placing Google ads promoting Brown, the candidate moved swiftly to pay the penalty by writing a $1,000 check to an autism consortium — flipping a storyline about a super PAC violation into a warm-and-fuzzy narrative.

He even used one of his latest radio ads to praise Warren “for joining” him in the pact, a subtle reminder to voters that attempting to run a campaign excluding “outside interests” was his idea in the first place.

Payne also said Brown’s presence on local radio also bolsters his image as an approachable, regular Joe.

“He uses pop-culture well. He spontaneously calls up sports talk-shows and gabs about the teams and scores, and maybe if they ask him about politics, that’s okay too,” Payne observed.

The Warren campaign and its backers argue that Brown’s poll spike is just a temporary snapshot in time before the real campaign has even been joined.

“I think it’ll move back toward her this summer once the one-dimensional communication becomes a two-dimensional argument,” said Shrum.

“He’s without a doubt a savvy politician,” said Matthew Miller, a former aide to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Anyone who thinks you can take beating an incumbent for granted is making a mistake, but all the dynamics in the race still favor her.”

It’s true the consumer protection advocate continues to attract overflow crowds, raise records amount of money and will enjoy inherent advantages by running with the president in a deep blue state. But Brown’s proven he’s adept at performing the tricky balancing act of carrying the GOP flag while picking places to align himself with Obama.

“No one thinks this will be easy but we’ve already made great strides and a candidate who was 17 points up has seen that lead get cut in half,” said Marla Romash, a consultant to Warren’s campaign. “There’s a lot of ground to be covered. We’re a long way from November.”

Nonetheless, among some more anxious Democrats, there’s a palpable sense that part of the shifting dynamic can be placed at the feet of Warren’s campaign, which critics say has been too slow to pivot from talking to progressive activists to independent voters who will decide the general.

It’s a sentiment that’s been voiced by the Democratic-friendly Blue Mass Group blog, which in a post last week raised the question of “whether a purely economic populist argument can be successful in a race against a guy who comes across as a regular even as he supports plutocracy.” “I think her argument has to get more approachable and local,” suggested one poster on the site.

“She has to move past the Democratic base. They’ve been spending a lot of time going to Democratic areas, doing organizational tasks. But you’ve got to chew gum and walk at the same time. Her campaign hasn’t figured out how to get on and stay on offense. They need to be scoring points on him,” said Payne. ” The question we have to ask ourselves is, does Elizabeth Warren have a second act?”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misspelled Marla Romash’s name.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Andrea Drusch @ 03/15/2012 03:14 PM CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misspelled Marla Romash’s name.