MassLive | Who is John Deaton, the long-shot Republican trying to unseat Mass. Sen. Elizabeth Warren?
By John L. Micek | jmicek@masslive.com
Originally Published on MassLive.com
Ask John Deaton what kind of Republican he is, and the answer comes quickly.
“I’m a Charlie Baker-type,” Deaton, the former Marine-turned-attorney, who’s hoping to add “U.S. Senator” to the hyphenated titles he already bears, told MassLive.
If the answer evokes a very specific mental image of the trad-GOP pol who’s socially moderate and fiscally conservative, that’s the point.
But it’s also a counterintuitive one.
The prevailing political narrative is that Donald Trump’s nativist and populist remake of the GOP eight years ago killed Baker’s genteel style of New England Republicanism stone dead.
The twice-impeached, four times-indicted former president’s performance in January’s New Hampshire primary, and the Bay State’s last month, which helped send him on his way to locking up the Republican presidential nomination for a third time, was also supposed to have thrown additional dirt on the corpse.
Michigan-born Deaton, 56, spent two decades practicing law in Rhode Island before setting up house in Swansea in January with his romantic partner of nine years, Kristi. When he surveyed the political landscape, he reached a different conclusion.
The result is a candidate who melds that Trumpian appeal to the working class with a moderation on social issues — he supports abortion rights and marriage equality — that should be familiar to Massachusetts voters.
“I am tired of these presidential candidates not representing the people that I care about — that’s the working class and the poor. I got in this race because they are not being represented,” he said. “When you look at the Senate, you do not see someone who has been working 50 hours a week, and yet you feel like you can’t get ahead.”
All of this matters because Deaton believes he has what it takes to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who’s running for a third term this fall.
And to do it, he’s relying in large part on the tale of his hardscrabble roots in a crime-ridden Detroit neighborhood — laid out in his memoir “Food Stamp Warrior” — that would seem Dickensian, if it were not already true.
“It’s time to get someone who fights for things,” Deaton said, declaring that Warren “fights for the rich and wealthy,” while he “[wants] to fight for the poor and the middle class.”
“I’m looking forward to introducing Massachusetts voters to someone like that,” he said.
But it won’t be easy, according to one veteran observer.
Deaton is “up against a nationally known, party-wide legend,” longtime Bay State political consultant Anthony Cignoli told MassLive. “Her ability to raise money is amazing. She won’t have to rely on a Massachusetts base [for fundraising].”
Indeed, Warren’s re-election campaign was sitting on a towering $3.9 million as of the end of last year, according to Federal Election Commission data.
Deaton, meanwhile, had promised to loan his campaign at least $500,000 to start, Politico reported.
And this week, major cryptocurrency executives pumped tens of thousands of dollars into Deaton’s campaign, Politco also reported.
Deaton won the industry’s admiration after waging a high-profile legal fight with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, Politico reported. Warren, meanwhile, is one of the industry’s most vocal opponents on Capitol Hill, noted by the online news site.
Deaton also likely will face a primary.
Quincy City Councilor Ian Cain has filed the requisite paperwork, and is expected to formally launch his candidacy later this month, Boston.com reported.
“What we’re doing right now is just starting this process of forming the political startup that it is, making sure that we can get on the ballot,” the 41-year-old said, according to Boston.com. “It’s a big lift to get on the ballot here in Massachusetts.”
Other Republicans, along with Libertarians, also are jockeying for a position for the fall ballot, according to the FEC’s website.
The residency question
Deaton gets feisty when he’s asked about his comparably brief residency in the Bay State.
He quickly points out that he lived in Roxbury while attending the New England School of Law in Boston. He supported himself, he said, by working at Legal Sea Foods at Copley Place.
“You could find me playing basketball at Washington Park [in Roxbury],” Deaton said of his law school days.
Deaton knows enough about the Bay State to correctly answer that iced coffee can, indeed, be a winter drink.
“Kristi drinks it. I don’t,” he quipped.
Later, as an Ocean State-based attorney representing people stricken by asbestos-related illnesses, Deaton said his clients spanned the Commonwealth.
“I have literally been sitting at the kitchen tables of Massachusetts residents who are asbestos victims for the last two decades,” he said.
The question isn’t merely an academic one. Political hopefuls with residency issues traditionally haven’t had great luck at the polls.
They notably include TV physician Mehmet Oz, the Republican who lost to U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., in a nationally watched contest in 2022.
With his bald head, goatee, and plain-spoken style, it’s tempting to cast Deaton as a Republican photo negative of the Keystone State’s junior U.S. senator, who also has positioned himself as a champion of the everyday voter.
Deaton told MassLive that he’s ready to put his story against Warren, who also has tried to play up her working class roots in Oklahoma, any time.
“When you compare what I’ve done for working families, I will win that comparison every day,” he said.
In a statement to MassLive, a Warren campaign spokesperson parried, arguing that “on issue after issue, Elizabeth Warren has been one of the Senate’s strongest advocates for middle-class families.”
Warren has “taken on tough fights and won — from lowering costs for student debt and hearing aids, to taxing billionaire corporations to fund climate investments, to helping deliver more than $50 billion in federal funding to Massachusetts — and she’ll continue working hard for Massachusetts families,” the spokesperson said.
The Trump question
While most of the rest of the national Republican Party has realigned itself around Trump, Deaton told MassLive that he does not support the former president.
He said he also “100%” believes that President Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election, a position that will put him at odds with many in the party’s MAGA base.
But that position may endear him to the independent voters Deaton needs to remain competitive in a state where Democrats continue to have a statewide voter registration edge.
“He has to win unenrolled [voters] and independents. There aren’t enough Republicans in Massachusetts to get him elected,” Cignoli said.
Deaton told MassLive that he “doesn’t support any of the presidential candidates who are running.”
“This isn’t a hobby for me. I’m in this race, because at my core, I believe I can win. People need to see someone like me who isn’t a partisan person. I am loyal to Massachusetts and to my country,” he said.
On abortion rights
With abortion rights remaining at the center of the national conversation, Deaton has faced questions about his position on reproductive rights.
In an April 5 letter, Rebecca Hart Holder, the president of Boston-based Reproductive Equity Now, asked Deaton to clarify his position on the critical issue, writing that his “campaign website has virtually no information about your policy platform.”
Hart Holder also wrote that she was concerned about “extreme, anti-abortion statements from your senior campaign leadership.”
“Let me be crystal clear; I am pro-choice,” Deaton told MassLive, adding that “as the father ... of three daughters, I am making it clear that I support and agree with the law in Massachusetts as it relates to women’s reproductive rights.”
Under state law, Massachusetts “generally restricts” abortion at 24 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. State law also “generally requires” consent from a parent, guardian, or judge if the person seeking an abortion is younger than 16 years old.
In addition, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court has recognized the right to abortion under the Bay State’s constitution. In 2021, lawmakers passed, and Baker later signed, “comprehensive abortion rights legislation,” according to the advocacy group.
Deaton told MassLive that “when I get to the Senate, I will fight to protect those rights.”
Asked about situations where his position on abortion access might change, Deaton told MassLive that he “does not favor late-term abortions, unless there are fetal anomalies” or “the health of the mother” is at stake.
Deaton appeared to imply that he would oppose efforts to impose a nationwide abortion ban, saying that it was “disappointing for me that, with some of the Republicans argued for a half-century that [Roe v. Wade] should be overturned,” and abortion returned to the states. And now “they’re trying to get federal legislation.”
“This is not an issue where I align with some of the Republicans,” he said, adding “if that puts me at odds with my fellow Republicans, so be it.”
Warren, who supports making Roe v. Wade the law of the land, warned in February that Republicans will try to impose a nationwide ban if they retake the White House, reinforce their majority in the U.S. House and regain control of the U.S. Senate in November.
Earlier this week, Trump said he believed abortion was a states’ rights issue, and declined to endorse a nationwide ban, as some on the right had expected and hoped he would.
The announcement netted the former president scorn from Democrats and antiabortion forces alike.
In a post to X, Warren, referring to an anti-abortion ruling in Arizona, urged supporters to “remember: this is brought to you by Trump. He supports cruel bans like these, [and] he made them possible by overturning Roe.”
Ukraine and Israel
When it comes to the nation’s top two foreign policy challenges — the ongoing war in Ukraine and Israel’s increasingly bloody fight with the terrorist group Hamas — Deaton offers an answer that straddles the line between old-school GOP pragmatism and the America First-ism of the MAGA wing of the party.
He acknowledged that the United States has a legitimate foreign policy and national security interest in containing the ambitions of Russia’s strongman president Vladimir Putin.
But, he said, when it comes to continued U.S. aid to the embattled eastern European nation, “We can’t write blank checks.”
“My question is, ‘What’s our strategy?’ I’m someone who served on active duty in the Marine Corps. I identify with someone fighting for freedom,” he said. “But we can’t write blank checks. We have a tremendous [national] debt problem ... What’s the strategy and where’s the money going? I say we have to have those [answers] first, and then we talk about funding Ukraine.”
In Israel’s fight with Hamas, Deaton told MassLive he believes that “the start and end point is that Israel has the absolute right to defend itself.”
“Unfortunately people are starting to equate Israel and Hamas and that cannot be happening,” he continued. “Hamas is the evil entity in this equation. They are a terrorist organization whose charter is to destroy and kill every Jew, and make [Israel] into an Islamic state. Oct. 7 was an act of war and an act of terrorism.”
But, he noted, while Israel is justified in defending itself, “you need to do it in a way that minimizes citizen death.”
The migrant question
With the Bay State facing a nearly $2 billion obligation to fund its emergency shelter system over the next two years, Democratic Gov. Maura Healey and her allies in the Legislature have repeatedly called on the federal government to help.
If he’s elected, that means Deaton will be among the lawmakers called upon to step up.
Deaton criticized Warren for her procedural vote against a border bill in February that was opposed by many Republicans, arguing that “it may not have been a perfect bill, but it was better than the status quo.”
The Democrat has defended her vote, saying “Senate Republicans killed their own border deal, and I am not willing to start the next round of negotiations with [that] bill as the foundation.”
Deaton said he favors a path to citizenship for so-called “dreamers,” the young people who were brought to the United States as children; requiring asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while their cases are adjudicated, and ending the Biden administration’s “catch-and-release” program.
“We’re a country of laws,” he said.
The bottom line
If he hopes to both win the GOP nomination, and prevail against a well-funded incumbent with a national profile, Deaton will need the infrastructure and organization to match.
The early indications are that he is assembling it.
In addition to his support in the crypto community, Deaton has attracted high-profile support from former Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci and Mark Cuban, a TV personality and a co-owner of the Dallas Mavericks of the NBA.
Deaton , who recently guested on Scaramucci’s podcast, called the GOP media personality “a regular guy once you get to know him.”
“Anthony is a very successful person — and he’s been great about not just supporting me, but giving me advice,” Deaton said. “He’s been in the political arena, and he’s a good guy.”
A number of Baker’s former advisers, including Deaton’s spokesperson Jim Conroy, and — according to Politico — former Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, also are lending a hand to the campaign.
The way Cignoli, the veteran consultant, sees it, Deaton will need all the help he can get if he wants to have even a prayer of remaining competitive against Warren.
Warren isn’t “just running to win. She’s running to decimate her opponents,” Cignoli told MassLive. “Even though [Deaton] maintains a space as a Baker-like Republican, she only sees one thing — maintaining a Democratic seat.”
Deaton, who told MassLive he’s been a Democrat, and is now a Republican, argued that he’s in it to win it — irrespective of the long odds.
“Elizabeth Warren wants to desperately keep [her] job. “I ... want to go do the job,” he said.
