Senator Edward J. Markey would lead Scott Brown in a hypothetical November 2014 Senate matchup between the two, according to a new poll.
Forty-three percent of the registered voters surveyed said they would vote for
Markey, while 38 percent said they would cast their ballot for Brown, according to a poll from the MassINC Polling Group.
Fourteen percent said they did not know or were undecided.
Markey was sworn in as the statest newest senator this month after winning a special election last month to finish the term of former senator John F. Kerry. He beat Republican Gabriel E. Gomez by 10 percentage points on June 25.
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Markey faces election again next year.
Brown, a Republican, was unseated by Elizabeth Warren in 2012. He was largely expected to challenge Markey in the special election, but decided not to enter the race.
He has not said whether he plans to run again for public office in 2014.
The poll surveyed 419 Massachusetts registered voters by live telephone interviews from July 17 to 20. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.8 percentage points.
Tisei open to another bid for Tierney’s House seat
Republican Richard Tisei, who narrowly lost his bid to unseat Representative John F. Tierney last year, said Tuesday that he is giving “a lot of serious thought and serious consideration” to running again for the Sixth Congressional District seat in 2014.
Tisei, who lost by a single percentage point in November, said in a telephone interview there were three questions that he was mulling as he moved toward a decision, which he said he expects to make by summer’s end.
The first was whether he could offer more effective representation for the district.
The second was if he could help strengthen the Massachusetts delegation’s “clout in Congress,” where the US House of Representatives is currently controlled by the GOP.
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And the third was whether he thought he could help “change the poisonous atmosphere” in Washington.
“If I feel like I can check off all three of those boxes, I’d be very inclined” to make a run, he said.
Tisei, former state legislator and 2010 Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, noted: “I’m leaving my calendar open for the next 16 months.”
Still, he added he was not fully focused on politics right now.
Tisei, who is openly gay, married his longtime life partner, Bernard F. Starr, this month.
Whether or not Tisei mounts a second bid, Tierney will definitely face an opponent in 2014.
Seth Moulton, a Marblehead native and former Marine, said this month that he would challenge Tierney for the Democratic nomination for the seat.
Attorney Marisa DeFranco, also a Democrat, has said she will run as well.
“I welcome people of all parties to the campaign to represent the residents and families of the Sixth District in Congress,” Tierney said in a statement.
In the second quarter of the year, Tierney raised $214,000. But only $123,000 of that came from individuals, a rather anemic sum.
The rest of his three-month haul came from political committees.
The Sixth District includes the northeastern part of the state, from Bedford to Saugus to Rockport to Salisbury.