Better than I would've guessed.
Kirk's approvals are awful, he's gonna get Blanched.
Nah, he's going to get Browned
The Brown-Warren race was completely different, both had very high approval ratings on election day. Kirk's approval ratings are now 25-42, that's gonna be really hard for him to overcome especially in a Presidential year when Democrats always come home in Illinois. Gonna be rough.
That's his CURRENT approval rating, 15 months before the election. Also, MA is much more Democratic than IL. Brown could have run a perfect campaign and would have still lost.
Surely Mass. is more swingy than Illinois though?
MA is swingy with gubernatorial races only. At the presidential and senate level it's been very inelastic for decades. Scott Brown is the sole recent exception to that rule.
There have been exactly two open Senate races in Massachusetts in the past 30 years. It's hard to make generalizations based on that.
