Who the heck is John Deaton?

Above, John Deaton on a campaign stop in Massachusetts earlier in the summer.

by Gintautas Dumcius, CommonWealth Beacon

September 23, 2024

MASSACHUSETTS VOTERS are poised to return Elizabeth Warren to the US Senate, according to a new poll.

Warren, a 75-year-old Cambridge Democrat and national voice of the party’s progressive wing, is running for a third term and facing a challenge from John Deaton, a 57-year-old cryptocurrency lawyer who moved to Massachusetts from Rhode Island in order to run for the Republican nomination.

A MassINC Polling Group survey, conducted for CommonWealth Beacon and WBUR, found Warren receiving 56 percent of the vote to Deaton’s 35 percent. Seven percent said they were undecided.

The poll, made possible through a Knight Election Hub grant, surveyed 800 likely Bay State voters, through live telephone interviews and a text message link to an online survey, between September 12 and September 18. It has a margin of 4.1 percentage points.

The results closely mirror a poll released last week conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, which found that 58 percent of likely voters back Warren, while 32 percent said they’d vote for Deaton.

The MassINC poll, like the UNH survey, showed a wide swath of voters aren’t familiar with Deaton. Asked if they have a favorable or unfavorable view of him, 47 percent said they’d never heard of him.

Deaton, who moved to Bolton in order to establish Massachusetts residency, has loaned himself $1 million in order to mount the uphill Senate bid. Warren has roughly $5 million in cash on hand.

Deaton has argued that Warren is too much of a partisan and claimed she is electorally weaker than she appears. He has pointed to her 2020 presidential run, when she came in third, behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, in the Massachusetts primary.

Warren, in fundraising appeals, has focused on Deaton being “recruited” to run against her from Rhode Island, and after Deaton won a three-way primary, Warren’s campaign manager blasted out a statement saying he was the pick of “a small handful of crypto billionaires and corporate special interests.”

Deaton has sought to appeal to more centrist voters beyond the GOP’s tiny base in Massachusetts, touting his pro-choice stand on abortion and saying he’ll write-in a candidate for president – possibly former governor Charlie Baker – rather than vote for Donald Trump.

But Democrats and independent voters, who make up most of the electorate in Massachusetts, overwhelmingly back Warren, as do women voters, according to the new poll. In fact, Warren’s big lead comes entirely from a huge advantage she enjoys with women voters. The poll shows Warren winning 66 percent of the female vote, to Deaton’s 25 percent, while men are split 45 percent to 45 percent between the two.

At 52 percent, Warren has lower favorability ratings in Massachusetts than the top of the Democratic ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who each garnered 58 percent. Her unfavorability rating is also slightly higher at 41 percent.

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

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