Republican attorney and Marine veteran John Deaton of Bolton won a US Senate primary in Massachusetts on Tuesday and will now face longtime Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren in November.
Deaton, a personal injury attorney and crypto advocate, moved from Rhode Island to Massachusetts last year. He faced off in the primary against Ian Cain of Quincy, Massachusetts’ first black and openly gay city council member, and Bob Antonellis, an engineer and political newcomer from Medford.
Deaton, 56, has refused to say whether he’ll vote for Donald Trump in the presidential race; Antonellis was the only candidate to pledge support for the top of the ticket in the historically blue state’s race.
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Deaton was far better-funded than either of his competitors thanks in large part to a $1 million loan he made to his campaign. He more than doubled Cain’s spending and had $975,000 on hand at the end of June, according to FEC records. At the same time, Cain had about $22,000 left in his war chest.
Deaton has often told the story of his low-income upbringing in a violent and impoverished Highland Park neighborhood of Detroit. He said he'd watched a thief stab his mother and, on his first day of high school, had a gun shoved in his mouth.
He said he broke the cycle of poverty by working his way through college and law school before going on to join the Marine Corps and spending seven years as a special assistant to the U.S. attorney in Yuma, Arizona, fighting cartels in the 1990s.
Deaton said he's spent the last 22 years representing injured workers in legal battles against "corporations and insurance companies."
Massachusetts has not elected a Republican to statewide office since moderate GOP Gov. Charlie Baker left the governor’s mansion in January 2023. Polling suggests Warren, a former Republican herself, is likely to hold her seat in November.
The state Republican Party only fielded challengers to Warren and two other House incumbents: Democrat Reps. Stephen Lynch and Bill Keating. Seven other Massachusetts House Democrats, none of whom faced primary challenges, are expected to sail to victory in the general election.
Warren faced a competitive race when she beat out Republican incumbent Scott Brown in 2012. She scored more than 60% of the vote in 2018 and President Biden carried the state with 66% of the vote in 2020.
Deaton has focused on the migrant crisis and on "retiring" Warren from office.
"Thanks to the failed policies of and partisanship of career politicians like Elizabeth Warren, every state is now a border state, and Massachusetts is sucking the consequences," Deaton said in a campaign video.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis famously flew migrants to the wealthy Massachusetts enclave Martha's Vineyard in 2022.
Deaton wrote on X on Monday that Warren is "more focused on her national profile and special interest groups" than spending time in local communities. "It's going to cost her on Nov. 5th."
All three candidates have made the border central to their campaign and bashed the state's sanctuary policies.
Antonellis said he would push to end sanctuary state status in Massachusetts, which he said is "destroying whole regions of the country." He had also pushed to ban offshore and onshore wind farms and came under fire for claiming the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job.
"Washington is stealing our liberty and freedoms, systematically, even Demonically," Antonellis wrote on his campaign website. "9/11 as an ‘inside job,’ we’ll be talking more about Harvard’s role in that, it was done, in part, to get American Patriots to support the Patriot Act, which forces Americans to nearly undress, just to get on a plane, and legalized spying on everyone."
