U.S. Senator from Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren projected to win third term

Colin A. Young

NOV. 5, 2024…..Massachusetts voters on Tuesday chose to send Elizabeth Warren to a third term in the U.S. Senate, one in which the Cambridge Democrat has broadly pledged to “deliver results for the Commonwealth, end corruption in Washington, make our economy work for the middle class, and protect our democracy.”

The Associated Press called the Senate race for Warren at 8 p.m. Tuesday, projecting as polls closed that she will defeat Republican John Deaton once all votes are counted. There were cheers again at SoWa Power Station in Boston as Warren’s victory was reported on CNN.

Warren, who turned 75 in June, burst onto the political scene in 2011 when she jumped into the race against Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown. She beat Brown, the incumbent, by almost 250,000 votes in 2012 and has faced little competition since. She handily dispatched a challenge from Geoff Diehl in 2018, before launching an unsuccessful run for president in 2020.

Deaton, a U.S. Marine and cryptocurrency lawyer from Rhode Island who moved across the border to Swansea in January (and since to Bolton) and approached the MassGOP about challenging Warren, pitched himself as a Republican in the mold of Charlie Baker, not Donald Trump. Along with a nonpartisan approach, Deaton suggested he would switch parties to prevent passage of a national abortion ban if he were elected and enraged some of the state’s most conservative figures in the process.

Immigration was one of a handful of flash points in Warren’s second reelection. The Democrat voted against a bipartisan immigration reform bill this spring, one that was supported by top Democrats on Beacon Hill as the first comprehensive set of changes in decades and a first step towards addressing the state’s costly migrant crisis. Deaton said he would have supported the bill.

“Yes, we need comprehensive immigration reform, but we need to negotiate a bill that actually gives that to us and that doesn’t let extremist Republicans continue to block actually making change in this area,” Warren said during her second debate against Deaton last month. She said that she would “certainly take a hard look at” the bill again if a new president puts it forward in the same form “especially if it’s not already dead.”

“But understand this: when a bill is already dead, part of what you do when you vote is you’re signaling where you want to go on the negotiations. I made clear in every speech I gave and every time I talked about this, that it is not enough to do half of it,” Warren said. “We need full reimbursement for what the states are spending and we need to make sure we have a pathway to citizenship.”