EDITOR’S NOTE: A clarification has been added to this post after John Deaton announced his Senate candidacy.
The sun comes up this week on the best chance Massachusetts Republicans have had to win a U.S. Senate race since Elizabeth Warren waxed incumbent Scott Brown in 2012.
But that’s not saying much. The coming-out party for John Deaton, poised to repeat his 2024 run against Warren, is set for Worcester’s Off the Rails bar, aptly named given the local GOP’s modern-day ineptitude when it comes to winning federal office here. And the erstwhile candidate tells MASSterList he’s actually not formally announcing pending a late-November endorsement vote by the Republican State Committee that could clear the primary field for Deaton.
“If I don’t have to spend all my time trying to convince Republicans I’m the right choice, I can spend my time talking to independents,” says Deaton, not to mention raising the necessary dough and taking potshots at Democratic incumbent Ed Markey, Congressman Seth Moulton, and potential challenger Rep. Ayanna Pressley.
After Monday’s night’s emphatic announcement that he’s running, we circled back to Deaton, who reiterated that the only conceivable roadblock would be if a serious primary challenger with Trump’s backing emerged, forcing him into a costly, time-consuming battle for the nomination. Says Deaton: “I’ll cross that bridge then.”
A State Committee nod wouldn’t necessarily guarantee Deaton a primary pass. Anyone with around $20,000 to drop on buying nomination signatures and the ability to marshal 15% support from the trail mix at the State GOP convention could get on the ballot and at least distract Deaton. And there’s also the impossible-to-predict deployment of the Democrats’ not-so-secret weapon, Donald J. Trump, not known to be fond of never-Trump Republicans like Deaton. If the president were to endorse some other candidate, that might be a deal breaker for Deaton.
But if the whole thing seems a tad iffy, the Deaton rerun is not without a sane rationale.
For a first-time candidate, Deaton handled himself well in his ultra-longshot 2024 run. He calmly shrugged off the bleating of the party’s Trump-zombie wing – just a couple of years after they managed to run Charlie Baker out of town – and rolled up 65% of the primary vote. And in an echo of Joe Malone’s 1988 run against Ted Kennedy that set Malone up to win the state treasurer’s job in 1990, Deaton eschewed extreme red-meat attacks on Warren, instead dropping one of the cycle’s most amusing sound bites in a WBZ-TV debate: “I got news for you Senator, all of you [in Congress] suck.”
His reward: nearly 1.4 million votes, the most for a GOP Senate nominee since Brown got 1.46 million in his 2012 loss to Warren, and light years ahead of losers like Geoff Diehl (979,000 in a 2018 dismemberment by Warren) and Mitt Romney (just 894,000 against Ted Kennedy in 1994). “If I were to get that amount this time I would win,” says Deaton of his 2024 haul.
But how? The basic elements of Deaton’s pitch are the same as two years ago – the status quo is broken, voters want help not partisan b.s., and neither Markey nor his challengers are capable of delivering the bacon.
“The ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ as written, I probably wouldn’t have supported it. But had I been in the Senate, maybe I could have supported it if you’re gonna give me billions for the Cape bridges,” says Deaton, who sees himself as a swing vote in the mold of former Sen. Joe Manchin. “The difference between me and the Democrats is no matter what Trump offers they’re a hard no. I’m a maybe.”
By this time next year, could beleaguered Massachusetts voters – after months of hammering away at our all-Democratic status quo by an unopposed Deaton and the three Republican candidates for Governor – overcome their federal-office GOP gag reflex and vote for an ex-Marine, rags-to-riches candidate they seemed not to hate once before?
Maybe.
And really, what other option does the off-the-rails GOP have?