New Globe Poll Shows Charlie Baker Soaring

The new Boston Globe/SocialSphere poll out Thursday night shows Charlie Baker rocketing to a nine-point lead, 45% to 36% over Martha Coakley. That’s a big change over the past two weeks in Baker’s direction. The Globe poll has been a little too volatile week-to-week to feel super-confident in the size of that lead; but the direction, if not the snapshot, of the race gibes with what we’re seeing in the WBUR/MassINC weekly poll, which showed Baker overtaking Coakley by a single point this week.

That narrower race is what some outside Coakley-backing groups see, according to a polling memo I obtained today. The poll was done by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a well-known Democratic pollster, for the Mass Independent Expenditure Political Action Committee, which is funded by AFSCME, EMILY’s List, Service Employees International Union, and Democratic Governors Association.

The memo claims that Coakley holds a one-point lead, 45%-44%, in a live-telephone survey of 611 likely voters, with a +/-4.0% margin of error, taken from October 20-22 (this Monday through Wednesday).

Take that for what you will. My own sense, as I suggested on Wednesday, is that things are slipping toward Baker, and Coakley needs to reverse the trend soon to prevail. I find a nine-point lead a little hard to believe (and I don’t think many in either campaign believe it, either), but I think it probably feels a little better to be in Baker’s headquarters than Coakley’s right about now.