These days, the senatorial contest in Massachusetts is getting drowned out by the deafening noise emanating from presidential election news coverage. But in recent weeks, Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren appears to be pulling away from Republican incumbent Scott Brown and now holds a 4.4% lead in the RealClearPolitics polling average.

Boston Globe reporter Michael Levenson checks in on the two candidates’ evolution of styles throughout the course of the campaign cycle:

Fifteen months ago, exploring a run for the Senate, ­Elizabeth Warren told 60 activists at a Dorchester house party that if she had not succeeded in creating a consumer protection agency, there would have been “blood and teeth on the floor.”

The activists loved it. Here was Warren in full pugilistic mode, the full-throated voice of liberals who had watched dispiritedly as Republicans rose to power on the energy of the Tea Party. At last, they had their counterweight.

Now, as Warren steams into the last two days of her closely fought race with Senator Scott Brown, there is a lot less blood and teeth on the floor and a lot more hugs and hearts on the sleeve. She has softened her ­image and rhetoric over the campaign, becoming a more polished and, some say, more conventional Democratic candidate.

Brown, a veteran politician who has long branded himself a bipartisan bridge-builder, has undergone his own shifts. He has risked his likability by going on the attack and has pushed his pitch to the left with ads that feature President Obama and tout his support for abortion rights and equal pay for women.

Brown’s moves, designed to tarnish his opponent’s character and align himself with some Democratic ideals, may reflect the political calculation of a ­Republican trying to win in a heavily Democratic state in a presidential year.

On Saturday, speaking ­before several hundred supporters at a rally at Plimoth Plantation, Brown ­made a direct ­appeal to voters sick of partisan gridlock. He said Warren would march “in lockstep” with her party while he would be “an ­independent voter, somebody down there working together with both sides.”