BOSTON — John Deaton has a plan to define himself.
The Republican U.S. Senate candidate is betting that his path to an upset in Massachusetts runs not through his own party’s base, but through voters who normally vote Democrat — particularly moderate Democrats, unenrolled voters and college-educated women — while an expensive Democratic primary leaves his eventual opponent weakened and exposed.
That was the strategy Deaton candidly laid out last week during a call with supporters that was billed as a “campaign update,” and also served as a fundraising pitch. Deaton and his consultants walked through polling and message-testing results, discussed how they intend to divide voters into targeted groups and made a case for why donors should help finance the campaign’s fall advertising.
The approach is predicated on a result Deaton said he expects in the Sept. 1 Democratic primary: a U.S. Sen. Ed Markey victory over U.S. Congressman Seth Moulton.
Recent polling has shown the Democratic contest tightening, with the University of New Hampshire’s June poll putting Markey ahead of Moulton by 6 percentage points. The general election polling, however, remains much more difficult terrain for Deaton: the same poll has Markey ahead of Deaton by 16 points.
Deaton nonetheless said he is hoping Markey wins — and wins by enough to leave Moulton supporters looking elsewhere.
“I think he’s going to win, I’m hoping,” Deaton said. “I’m hoping all those disenfranchised Moulton voters will look to me.”
A U.S. Marine and cryptocurrency lawyer, Deaton moved from Rhode Island to Massachusetts in 2024 before launching his unsuccessful Senate campaign against U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The 59-year-old lives in Swansea and has pitched himself as a Republican in the mold of Charlie Baker, not Donald Trump, saying he did not vote for the U.S. president. He wrote a personal memoir called “Food Stamp Warrior: A Memoir” about his childhood growing up in poverty in Detroit.
Learning from his unsuccessful run against Warren, Deaton said this time he’s decided to largely stop courting Republican voters.
“I go to an occasional big Republican event here and there, but most of my time I am talking to non-Republicans,” Deaton said.
The UNH poll showed in a matchup with Markey, 94% of Republicans said they would vote for Deaton, and only 2% for Markey. Democrats were more split — 79% said they would vote Markey, 2% Deaton and 18% were undecided. Meanwhile, with Independents, Deaton had a slight edge — 39% to Markey’s 38%, with 23% yet to make a decision.
He described being at a senior center the day before, where “three-quarters of them were Democrats, and they were asking me for signatures, they were donating. The message is winning with them.”
In the primary, Moulton has emphasized generational change and his willingness to challenge his party, while Markey has defended his long progressive record.
His consultants presented polling that suggests there may be room for the message that Deaton offers something outside of the traditional partisan fight, but also made clear the scale of the challenge. Deaton said the survey showed him with only 25% name recognition among Massachusetts voters.
Brent Buchanan of national polling firm Cygnal said the campaign’s message testing produced an unusually large movement among voters after they were given information about Deaton and his positions.
“I do a lot of these surveys all around the country in blue states, red states, purple states, and when you have somebody at 25% name identification, and you run them through this exercise of the message testing, positives and negatives on both, you almost never see a shift this large,” Buchanan said.
The campaign’s strongest message, according to Buchanan, is healthcare and affordability. Deaton is emphasizing his proposal to break up vertically integrated health insurers and pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, which he argues are squeezing consumers and independent pharmacies.
“What is effective at moving somebody’s vote choice to John away from undecided, the No. 1 overall, is the health insurance message,” Buchanan said.
The testing also points toward a highly segmented advertising strategy. Buchanan said healthcare performed particularly well among moderate Independents, while moderate Democrats responded more strongly to aspects of Deaton’s biography and messages about building more housing.
“We have the path of who needs to be targeted,” Buchanan said. “We have the messages that need to be delivered.”
Buchanan singled out college-educated women as especially important in a state where Republicans face a steep disadvantage.
College-educated women are “kryptonite for Republican political campaigns,” Buchanan said. “If we can move college-educated women, you can win Massachusetts.”
Deaton is also counting on a strategy that he says will allow him to spend less on traditional field operations. Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Minogue, Deaton said, is building a substantial ground operation that is also spreading the Senate candidate’s message. In large measure due to his own wealth, Minogue has amassed a considerable campaign war chest for the race for governor, outraising his opponent, Gov. Maura Healey.
“Fortunately, I don’t have to spend money on the ground game because Minogue’s doing it, and his door knockers are my door knockers,” Deaton said.
Still, Deaton is looking to raise more to execute his targeted advertising strategy.
Deaton said he expects national cryptocurrency interests and superPACs to take a closer look at the race after the Democratic primary. He is a crypto attorney and advocate, who is representing thousands of crypto token holders in a legal battle against the Securities and Exchange Commission, while Markey has called for greater regulation of the space focused on its environmental impacts. But Deaton added that he is careful to not make it a “tabletop” issue central to the general message of his campaign.
Instead, he is targeting the estimated 1.1 million crypto holders in Massachusetts, he said, and serving that message to them directly.
He specifically pointed to the expected Senate vote on the CLARITY Act, a federal bill to establish a clear market structure for cryptocurrencies, as a potential opportunity to mobilize those crypto holders against Markey if the senator votes against it.
“I think Fairshake [super PAC] and others are not really paying — it’s not that they’re not paying attention to my race, but Moulton is better for crypto than Markey is, right?” Deaton said. “So I think that when Markey beats Moulton and we show them that there’s a path to victory here, then maybe that crypto PAC money will come help seal the deal here in Massachusetts.”
The strategy marks a contrast with Deaton’s 2024 campaign against Warren.
“Last time, I sucked as a candidate running asking for money,” Deaton said.
This time, he said, he believes the circumstances are fundamentally different. He has no Republican primary opponent, expects his Democratic opponent to emerge from a bruising contest “limping” and has a campaign message designed around voters who are not his party’s traditional constituency.
He also discussed some of his plans for eventual debates with the winner of the Democratic primary. Deaton said three media organizations have requested general election-debates and that he is pushing for an early debate date to reach more voters before early voting begins. Markey and Moulton have already faced off in Democratic primary debates, while Deaton participated in a June cross-party debate with Moulton that Markey skipped.
Deaton said he expects to use those debates to reinforce his economic and anti-incumbent message, while also portraying Markey as out of step with Massachusetts voters.
“There is really a huge anti-incumbency message out there. And listen, I don’t know if anyone saw it, but I’m the candidate that got on stage and said, ‘F the Republican party, F the Democratic party. You need an Independent voice,” he said.
Explaining that rhetoric to his supporters on Tuesday, he said, “A lot of people were surprised. There were some Republicans, they were like, ‘Boy, that was kind of harsh.’ And I said to them, ‘When you look at 18-year-olds to 30-year-olds, they want to burn down Washington. They want to burn the system down. And so my messaging when I’m on the debate stage and I say something that you guys might think, ‘Wow,’ scratching your head, ‘I didn’t see that coming.’ It is because we’re tuning into that kind of attitude.”
But the underlying challenge remains straightforward: Deaton has to turn a campaign built around targeting and persuasion into actual votes in a state where Democrats have a substantial advantage.
His own consultants’ polling presentation acknowledged as much. The campaign says it needs to take Deaton’s name recognition from 25% to 80%.
With these targeted messages, Buchanan said, “This race moves 20 points, 20 net points, but it’s going to require the resources to get out there.”
For Deaton, then, the fall strategy is not simply to attack the Democratic nominee. It is to establish an identity first, as a veteran, consumer lawyer and political outsider focused on healthcare, energy costs and housing, willing to cross the traditional partisan divide.