The assumption for the MA Senate race is that the Big Money Boyz will lard up Scott Brown with oodles of cash, allowing him to run a scorched earth campaign that decimates Elizabeth Warren. But Warren has consistently raised a lot more money than Brown, most of it from small donors, since she entered the race.

If Elizabeth Warren were no threat to the established order, they wouldn’t get around to any effort to stop her ascension in the Massachusetts Senate race until much later in the cycle, if at all. But her surge over Scott Brown, and the possibility that she would have an even bigger perch from which to articulate her agenda for the middle class, clearly has Wall Street spooked. So much so that they’re already marshaling forces against her, with a year until the general election.

Elizabeth Warren’s success and the enthusiasm around her campaign has knocked every potential challenger in the Democratic primary out of the race. She has the ability to stay competitive with the Wall Street-backed Brown in fundraising, and the attacks put forward by the likes of Karl Rove have been laughable. Warren is still a neophyte candidate and a lot can go wrong; she probably needs to improve among independents, and you could see some gaffes and distortions of her record coming into play. But at the moment, she is well-positioned to enter the Senate.

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley plans to sue the five biggest banks in the mortgage business over “unlawful and deceptive conduct” in their foreclosure operations. A news conference is scheduled at 1pm ET to detail the charges, which were filed in Suffolk Superior Court.

If you wanted an indication that Scott Brown was in any way nervous about his impending re-election matchup against Elizabeth Warren next year, he has now officially endorsed Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that was the brainchild of his future opponent.

Another poll confirms that the Massachusetts Senate race is currently shaping up to be one of the closest races in 2012 and could potentially be the race that decides which party controls the chamber. According to a new UMass Lowell-Boston Herald poll of registered voters, incumbent Republican Scott Brown holds a narrow 41 percent to 38 percent lead over Democrat Elizabeth Warren, and that gap can easily close.

U.S. Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) has been dodging questions about his stance on the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA, S811). ENDA would prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. He also mistakenly thinks Massachusetts already took care of this.

Elizabeth Warren has had a good launch to her Massachusetts Senate campaign. She generated a lot of energy in the state with her announcement tour and a viral video (below the fold) on class warfare admired by liberals throughout the country.  That was quickly followed by fabulous early polling, showing her slightly ahead of Scott [...]

The new closeness of this race could have big national implications. Democrats will have 23 seats to defend this cycle compared to the Republicans who only need to defend 10 seats. A Democratic win in Massachusetts could help make up for likely Democratic losses elsewhere, like in North Dakota. It is easy to picture a scenario where the outcome in Massachusetts is the difference between Democrats narrowly holding onto the Senate and narrowly losing the chamber.

I see this as an opportunity to test a legitimate anti-bank populist message against a real opponent. Massachusetts may be a blue state, but Scott Brown has a 54% approval rating and will have scads of money to tout his record and distort his opponent’s. He’s already doing some of that, playing the role of faux-populist with New England Cable Network, pretending that he “worked very hard to make sure that banks didn’t act like casinos with our money.” The history is clear. He single-handedly watered down the Volcker rule to almost nothing, mainly to protect Mass Mutual and other state banks. He has been the recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars of big bank largesse. This anti-bank claim he’s trying to make is untenable. And Warren knows it.