BOSTON – Republican U.S. Senate candidate John Deaton is a longshot against Democrat Elizabeth Warren, according to polls. But speaking to WBZ-TV, Deaton made his case for why he believes he should be Massachusetts’ next senator.
‘I have never been a Trump voter’
Deaton has conspicuously distanced himself from former President Donald Trump, a somewhat unusual move for a Republican candidate in an era of intense partisanship.
“I was excited, to be honest, on paper when President Trump first announced,” he said. “You know, someone who’s an outsider, someone who’s been a Democrat and a Republican, a businessman and a nonpartisan person, would kind of look at the country as a corporate leader.”
But Deaton was eliminated by Trump’s 2015 comments that Vietnam War POW, Senator John McCain, “was not a war hero; he is a war hero because he was captured.”
‘That really took me back. Someone who served in the Marine Corps, that really caught me off guard,” said Deaton, who did not vote for Trump in 2016 and 2020. ‘Just too much division. And if you know my story, I kind of grew up around conflict and violence and hatred and things like that, and it’s something that I try to reject in my life. And so I have never been a Trump voter.”
In his challenge to Incumbent Senator Elizabeth Warren, Deaton has criticized her for being divisiveand also said, “Fighting the rich is not the same as fighting for the working and middle class.”
John Deaton vs. Elizabeth Warren
As an example, Deaton cited Warren’s objections to the acquisition of troubled hospital chain Steward because healthcare giant United Healthcare was, in Deaton’s words, “a big company with a bad bottom line.” But when the deal fell through, “hundreds of people lost their jobs,” he said. “So that’s an example of that [when] fighting things is not the same as fighting for people. I spent 222 years fighting big companies, the biggest in the world – the Dow Chemicals, the Monsantos of the world, the Pfizers… but I was always fighting for my customers, and that, in my opinion, is just a big difference.”
From polls to the past, Deaton’s Senate bid is considered a long shot by many. But when asked if we’ll hear from him again, he replied: “Yes, you will.”
“We need to do something about the one-party rule here in Massachusetts. “I think even an objective, lifelong Democrat would agree with that,” he said. “We really need a healthy Republican Party because I think Massachusetts today is an example of what happens when there is only one party, and I would feel the same way if 88% of the legislature were Republican and all the executive offices were also Republican.”
Jon Keller
