Former Gov. Charlie Baker (R-MA) holds a double-digit lead over Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in a hypothetical U.S. Senate race match-up in Massachusetts, according to a poll.

The poll, conducted by the Fiscal Alliance Foundation, shows that 49 percent of the likely voter respondents would back Baker if he announced a bid, placing him 15 points ahead of Warren at 34 percent.

Moreover, the moderate Republican leads by a wide margin with independents, as Fiscal Alliance Foundation spokesman Paul D. Craney noted in a release associated with the survey: 

Senator Warren has significantly higher unfavorable numbers than her fellow Democrats statewide and that seems to be creating an opening for Baker, who always enjoyed large amounts of cross-party appeal. Looking at the cross tabs, Republicans seem to coalesce behind Baker (79%) in a way that Democrats do not around Warren (56%), and Baker leads with independent/unenrolled voters 2-1 at 57-26%.

Warren’s favorability rating is 5 points above water, with 49 percent finding her favorable  and 44 percent saying she is unfavorable, including 35 percent who find her “very unfavorable.” As Craney pointed out, her favorability rating indicates she is far less secure than some of her fellow prominent elected Democrat officials in the Bay State.

For instance, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s net favorability rating is plus 16 percent, as 47 percent view her positively, versus 31 percent who do so negatively. Similarly, 52 percent of likely voters say newly-minted Gov. Maura Healey (D-MA) is favorable compared to 27 percent who say she is unfavorable, giving her a net rating of plus 25 percent.

Baker and Warren both ran their last general election campaigns in 2018, and – perhaps surprisingly – Baker commanded more votes than Warren as a state-wide candidate that year and won his race by a larger margin than she won hers.  In his contest against Democrat Jay Gonzalez, Baker took 1,781,982 votes to Gonzalez’s 886,281, an impressive margin of 67 percent to 33 percent for a Republican in deep-blue Massachusetts.

The general election for U.S. Senate in 2018 saw a race between Warren and Republican Geoff Diehl, who lost last year’s gubernatorial race to Healey. Warren garnered 1,643,213 votes, or 60 percent of the electorate, to Diehl’s 979,507 votes (36 percent).

While the poll looks promising for Baker, it remains to be seen if he will launch a bid for the seat after becoming the president of the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) a few months ago.

The Fiscal Alliance Foundation sampled 750 likely voters May 7-8. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.6 percent, with a 95 percent confidence level.