WHEN JOHN DEATON speaks, he wants voters to see Charlie Baker. Elizabeth Warren is trying to make sure they see a potentially decisive vote for whoever emerges as Mitch McConnell’s even harder right successor as Senate Republican leader.
Deaton’s game plan was clear from the opening exchange on immigration policy in Tuesday night’s debate against Sen. Elizabeth Warren. “There’s only one extremist on this stage tonight, and it’s Elizabeth Warren,” her Republican challenger said. “I’m a moderate, centrist, common sense candidate.”
Deaton is a Never Trumper who says he plans to cast a write-in vote for president – possibly for the state’s popular former two-term governor.
If you close your eyes when listening to him, it’s hard to picture Baker. As governor, Baker tried to maintain a modulated tone as he brought his wonky, problem-solving approach to state government, eschewing the hard edges of partisan fights whenever he could. A brawling cryptocurrency lawyer who grew up in abject poverty in a Detroit hamlet, Deaton’s rapid-fire delivery feels more like a succession of right and left hooks, rhetorical equivalents of the actual punches he threw – and received – in the hardscrabble youth he describes in his memoir, Food Stamp Warrior.
But Deaton’s biggest challenge isn’t his sharp differences from Baker in style and bearing; it’s the different office he’s seeking. HIs views wouldn’t put him that out of step with the moderate impulses Massachusetts voters have shown in recent elections for governor, but his party label has become a non-starter when it comes to who the state’s electorate sends to Washington.
Apart from Scott Brown’s brief, two-year hold on a Senate seat after winning a January special election at the peak of the tea party movement, it’s been 30 years since Massachusetts voters sent a Republican to Congress, and polls suggest they aren’t about to break with that trend now.
A new UMass poll shows Warren leading Deaton, 56-30, a margin similar to that seen in a CommonWealth Beacon poll last month.
Deaton, a first time candidate up against a seasoned pol who has won two statewide races for Senate and waged unsuccessful bid for president, largely held his own against Warren in their hourlong face-off, cosponsored by WBZ-TV and the Boston Globe.
He ripped her for not voting for a bipartisan immigration reform bill. “You don’t let perfect get in the way of good,” he said, suggesting the bill would have at least made progress in addressing the crisis at the border.
Warren said she’s been willing to seek bipartisan compromise on all sorts of measures, and said she first voted for an immigration reform bill in 2013. She said her vote against the recent bill came after Donald Trump implored Republicans to reject it and it was clear that it was not going to pass. “I did not buy a ticket on a boat that Donald Trump had already sunk,” she said. “By the time we voted on this one, we all knew the bill was dead.”
He vowed to be an unyielding voice for abortion rights in the Senate, despite Warren’s effort to suggest he is no more trustworthy on the issue than the succession of Trump Supreme Court nominees who said in confirmation hearings that they would respect precedent, only to quickly toss Roe vs. Wade overboard after joining the court.
For all their back and forth on particular issues, Warren knew she held what is probably the winning card in the race.
“Look, this is about Senate control,” she said at one point, arguing that a vote for Deaton would be a vote to let Senate Republicans set the agenda on everything from abortion to environmental policy and gun regulations.
With just one more debate scheduled in the race – tomorrow night in Springfield – Deaton doesn’t have a lot of opportunity to win over voters, nearly half of whom had never heard of him in last month’s CommonWealth Beacon poll.
Underscoring the further challenge facing any moderate Republican in the state, as Deaton works to convince voters that he’s a “centrist, common sense candidate,” former state GOP chair Jim Lyons, who now leads a disaffected rump caucus of Trump-backing Republicans, shot out a message saying he’s even worse than Warren.
“Deaton isn’t worthy of our money, our time, or our votes,” Lyons wrote in a missive to his followers, shared yesterday by Politico’s Lisa Kashinsky.
The good news for Deaton is that Lyons’ views are only shared by a small slice of the state electorate. The bad news is that his efforts to convince the much broader group of voters who will decide the race that he’s a reasonable Republican alternative to Warren just don’t seem to square with how they see Washington working these days.
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