Attorney and cryptocurrency advocate John Deaton won the 2024 Massachusetts Republican primary for U.S. Senate Tuesday, easily topping engineer Bob Antonellis and Quincy City Council President Ian Cain to set up a general election showdown with Democratic incumbent Elizabeth Warren.
With nearly 20% of votes counted Tuesday evening, the Associated Press showed Deaton with 65% of ballots cast in the race, compared to 27% for Antonellis and 8% for Cain.
Deaton has leaned heavily on his biography in his campaign to date, describing himself as someone who grew up in extreme poverty in Michigan and was the first in his family to graduate from high school and college. He subsequently served in the Marines and worked as a trial lawyer, an array of experiences Deaton has asserted make him the embodiment of the American dream.
Deaton is harshly critical of Warren on a number of fronts, including her desire for more regulation in the crypto industry and what he calls her “blind partisan loyalty.” But he has also spoken negatively about Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, saying he didn’t support the former president in 2020 and won’t vote for him this fall.
“I have a revolutionary idea about politics — it’s called common sense,” Deaton told GBH News. “It’s not just about being nonpartisan, but it’s about tackling the issues of the day from a commonsense perspective.
”When I was in the Marine Corps, it was all about mission accomplishment: we don’t sit there and argue over why we got there, who’s to blame,“ he added. ”You solve the crisis, and then maybe you debrief and figure out what caused it so you don’t make that mistake again. So I’m a commonsense conservative, socially moderate Republican.“
While there was scant polling in the Republican primary contest, Deaton’s win was not a surprise. He raised nearly $1.8 million, compared to about $390,000 for Cain and less than $50,000 for Antonellis. Most of Deaton’s war chest came from a $1 million loan Deaton provided to his own campaign. He also spent far more than his rivals, with about $930,000 in expenditures compared to nearly $370,000 for Cain and roughly $38,000 for Antonellis.
Recently, Deaton handily won a straw poll conducted by the Norfolk County GOP.
Warren first became a senator after beating Republican incumbent Scott Brown in 2012, and she easily fended off a challenge from Republican Geoff Diehl in 2018, winning 60% of the vote to Diehl’s 36%. (Independent challenger Shiva Ayyadurai received 3% of the vote.)
On Tuesday, Deaton said a great deal has changed since the last time Warren had to make her case for reelection.
”Certainly, the migrant crisis wasn’t the issue that it is today,“ Deaton said. ”And also inflation and housing prices, grocery prices, energy prices, regular people being priced out of the economy. Inflation is literally crushing working families. So it’s a completely different environment, in addition [to the fact] that I’m a completely different candidate.“
Warren responded to Deaton’s victory with a Tuesday night press release in which she said she has committed to participating in two October debates, including one sponsored by GBH News and New England Public Media. The release didn’t identify Deaton by name, but offered an unflattering description of his candidacy from Janice Rottenberg, Warren’s campaign manager.
“A small handful of crypto billionaires and corporate special interests poured more than $2 million into a super PAC to handpick their preferred Republican candidate, and now Massachusetts voters have a clear choice that could determine control of the Senate,” Rottenberg said in the release. “We’ve accepted two general election debates in Boston and Springfield because the people of Massachusetts deserve a substantive policy conversation about abortion rights, the Supreme Court, funding for Medicare and Social Security, and other issues critical to our country’s future. We look forward to debating, and expect our Republican opponent to agree.”
In fact, Deaton told GBH News, he’s hoping to have five single debates with Warren: one each on income inequality, the migrant crisis, the national debt and economy, foreign wars, and women’s reproductive rights.
“We should go across the commonwealth and let the voters get a real look at both of us,” he said. “The country deserves it. Massachusetts deserves it.”
Deaton also took issue with Warren’s analysis of his victory.
“At my primary event tonight, I had well over a dozen lifelong Democrats who came to support me,” Deaton said. “And I think that the voters are ready for someone who’s nonpartisan — someone who’s only going to have the loyalty to Massachusetts and America.”
Also Tuesday, videographer Rob Burke clinched the Republican primary in Massachusetts’ 8th Congressional District, where he defeated healthcare worker Jim Govatsos and bar owner Daniel Kelly. Burke, who previously lost by a wide margin to longtime Democratic incumbent Stephen Lynch in the 2022 general election, will face Lynch again this fall.
State and local races
Most incumbent state lawmakers cruised through the primary, with only 26 of 160 state representatives and six of 40 state senators facing opponents.
At least two sitting state representatives, Lowell Democrat Rady Mom and Wareham Republican Susan Williams Gifford, fell to primary challengers. A third race, between Cambridge Rep. Marjorie Decker and Harvard teaching fellow Evan MacKay, had not been officially called Wednesday morning.
Mom, who became the first Cambodian-American state lawmaker in the country when he was elected 10 years ago, lost to another Cambodian-born candidate, Tara Hong. It was Hong’s second bid against Mom, and he’s run in part on a platform that calls for more transparency from the Legislature. Hong is set to face off against an independent candidate in the November election.
John Gaskey, a Coast Guard veteran from Carver who ran with the backing of former Mass. GOP Chair Jim Lyons, unseated Gifford. No Democrats or independent candidates are running for the seat, making it effectively Gaskey’s at this point.
Voters across 31 cities and towns, mostly north and west of Boston, also elected a new member of the Governor’s Council, the panel that vets judicial nominees. Concord Democrat Mara Dolan, who has worked as both a public defender and an aide to former state Senate President Stanley Rosenberg, defeated Councilor Marilyn Petitto Devaney of Watertown.
Devaney has held the seat since 1999, and beat Dolan with 51% of the vote two years ago. This time, Dolan jumped into the race a year and a half before the election and ran with the backing of four of Devaney’s council colleagues, U.S. Sen. Ed Markey and three members of Congress.
“I started [running] a year and a half ago, going into towns, communities all across the district to meet with local activists, to meet with community leaders and just to meet with everyone I could to make sure that they knew if they care who their judges are, they need to care who their governor’s councilor is,” Dolan told GBH News on Tuesday. “And everyone does, so we’ve been able to build a lot based on that.”
