Warren Wins Big in Massachusetts
Courtesy of Creative Commons
By Isha Marathe 11/07/2018
BOSTON – Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren has won re-election to the U.S. Senate, defeating Republican opponent Geoff Diehl and Independent Shiva Ayyaduria during Tuesday’s contentious midterm elections.
The Associated Press called Warren’s win minutes after Massachusetts polls closed at 8 p.m.
The Senator, who is predicted by political experts to make a White House run in 2020, is celebrating with other Massachusetts Democrats at Boston’s Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel.
Though Warren’s place in the Senate was not in any true danger, with significantly higher funds and an equally large lead in the polls over the past month, the race in between her and Diehl came down to support for President Trump. State Rep. and far-right candidate Diehl has shown consistent support for the president and co-chaired his campaign in the state, whereas Warren has clashed with him in the weeks leading up to the midterm elections.
During his campaign, Diehl repeatedly asked Warren of her apparent ambitions to run for president.
“She doesn’t care about your house,” Diehl said in the latest debate between the two. “She cares about the White House.”
Though talk around Warren’s potential run for president has been brewing since before the 2016 presidential elections, it reached a peak late September, when Warren announced she would “take a hard look” at running in the 2020 elections. She also released a video and a detailed DNA test to rebut the president’s allegations around her having fabricated her Native American ethnicity.
Political analysts projected Diehl openly embracing Mr. Trump would be his downfall for the Massachusetts voter-base.
“The people who like it in Massachusetts love it,” said Erin O’Brien, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “But there just aren’t enough of them for Geoff Diehl to carry the day.”
Warren won the midterm election by a little over 24 points, with Diehl finishing at 35.8 percent and Ayyaduria at 3.4 percent.
In spite of Warren’s victory, popularity and second term in the Senate, a recent WBUR poll found that 42 percent of Massachusetts voters view her unfavorably and 63 percent think she is not fit for president.