Wed. Nov 6th, 2024

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth (D-Mass.) Warren defeated Republican challenger John Deaton in Tuesday’s election. (CommonWealth Beacon)

Massachusetts voters on Tuesday handed U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren a third six-year term, choosing the Cambridge Democrat over her GOP challenger, John Deaton.

The Associated Press, which pulls in results from cities and towns across the state, called the race in Warren’s favor shortly after the polls closed at 8 p.m. Early returns had Warren, 75, leading Deaton 76 percent to 24 percent, with two percent of the vote in.

During the campaign, Warren, who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2020 and won third place in her home state primary, returned to a strategy that has served her well in previous Senate runs. She attempted to nationalize the race by arguing a vote for Deaton was a vote for Republican control of the US Senate.

For his part, Deaton, a 57-year-old cryptocurrency lawyer who moved to central Massachusetts from Rhode Island to run against Warren, called the former Harvard Law School professor a “far left” politician who had stayed too long in Washington.

Deaton spent much of the campaign seeking distance between himself and top Republicans like Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. He highlighted his support for abortion rights and portrayed himself as a moderate Republican in the mold of Charlie Baker, the former governor who won his second term in 2018.

Cryptocurrency executives backed Deaton’s bid, while Warren received donations from academia and the tech sector, according to campaign finance records.

The two candidates have clashed over crypto, with Warren arguing for stricter regulations in order to stem money laundering, and Deaton accusing her of being a “lobbyist” for the banking industry, which has been cautious of crypto.

Even as she faced Deaton, Warren left the state to serve as a campaign surrogate for Democrats elsewhere in the country, including Vice President Kamala Harris. Warren traveled to battlegrounds like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and donated more than $1.5 million to Democratic coffers.

This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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