United States Senate election in Massachusetts, 2012

Background

Democratic U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy was re-elected in 2006, and died on August 25, 2009 from a malignant brain tumor. On September 24, 2009, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick appointed longtime friend of Kennedy and former Democratic National Committee Chairman Paul G. Kirk to succeed Kennedy until a special election could be held. Kirk's appointment was especially controversial, as the Governor's ability to appoint an interim Senator was removed during the Romney administration by the Democratic-controlled legislature, as a precaution if Senator and presidential nominee John Kerry was elected President in 2004. Laws surrounding Senate appointment were quickly changed following Kennedy's death. The Massachusetts Republican Party sued in an attempt to halt Kirk's appointment, but it was rejected by Suffolk Superior Court Judge Thomas Connolly.

In the special election held on January 19, 2010, Republican State Senator Scott Brown defeated Democratic State Attorney General Martha Coakley in an upset victory. Brown thus became the first Republican to be elected from Massachusetts to the United States Senate since Edward Brooke in 1972 and he began serving the remainder of Kennedy's term on February 4, 2010.

Republican primary

Incumbent Scott Brown faced no challenges from within his party. The political action committee National Republican Trust, a group integral to Brown's election in 2010, vowed to draft a challenger for Brown but were unable to find one.

Candidates

Democratic primary

The Massachusetts Democratic Convention was held on June 2, 2012, where Warren received 95.77% of delegate votes. As the only candidate with 15% of delegate votes necessary to qualify for the primary ballot, Warren eliminated her challenger Marisa DeFranco, becoming the de facto nominee. The Democratic primary was held September 6, 2012, with Warren running unopposed.

Declared

Withdrew

Declined

Campaign

Brown ran as a moderate, stressing his ability to cross party lines and highlighting his votes for the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and to repeal "don't ask, don't tell". Warren campaigned on a platform championing the middle class, and supporting Wall Street regulation. Warren criticized Brown for continually voting with Republican leadership, and argued that he was not the bipartisan moderate he claimed to be. A staple of Brown's attack tactics against Warren was his consistent reference to her as "Professor Warren", in attempt to portray her as an elitist academic. Brown faced blowback after the second debate, during which he claimed conservative Antonin Scalia was a "model" Supreme Court Justice, prompting boos from the debate audience.

Warren spoke at the 2012 Democratic National Convention immediately before Bill Clinton on the penultimate night of the convention. Warren contrasted President Obama's economic plan with Mitt Romney's in the 2012 election and rebuked the Republican Party's economic policy stating: "Their vision is clear: 'I've got mine, and the rest of you are on your own.'" Warren positioned herself as a champion of a beleaguered middle class that, as she said, "has been chipped, squeezed and hammered." Brown attended the 2012 Republican National Convention, but was not a speaker there. According to Brown, he had rejected an offer to play a larger role, and limited his attendance to a single day because of scheduling demands.

Following Todd Akin's controversial "legitimate rape" comments, Brown was the first sitting Senator to demand he drop out of the Missouri U.S. Senate race. He also called on his Party to "recognize in its platform that you can be pro-choice and still be a good Republican." Brown's campaign had been endorsed by many Massachusetts Democrats, many of whom were prominently featured in his campaign ads.

In September 2011, a video of Warren explaining her approach to economic policy gained popularity on the internet. In the video, Warren rebuts the charge that asking the rich to pay more taxes is "class warfare", pointing out that no one grew rich in America without depending on infrastructure paid for by the rest of society, stating:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. ... You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

On July 13, 2012, President Obama sparked a controversy when he echoed her thoughts in a campaign speech saying, "Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

On September 14, 2011, Warren declared her intention to run for the Democratic nomination for the 2012 election in Massachusetts for the United States Senate. The seat had been won by Republican Scott Brown in a 2010 special election after the death of Ted Kennedy.

Warren won the Democratic nomination on June 2, 2012, at the state Democratic convention with a record 95.77% of the votes of delegates. She was endorsed by the Governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick. Warren and her opponent Scott Brown agreed to engage in four televised debates, including one with a consortium of media outlets in Springfield and one on WBZ-TV in Boston.

Warren encountered significant opposition from business interests. In August 2012, Rob Engstrom, political director for the United States Chamber of Commerce, claimed that "no other candidate in 2012 represents a greater threat to free enterprise than Professor Warren." She nonetheless raised $39 million for her campaign, the most of any Senate candidate in 2012.

Warren received a primetime speaking slot at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, immediately before Bill Clinton, on the evening of September 5, 2012. Warren positioned herself as a champion of a beleaguered middle class that "has been chipped, squeezed, and hammered." According to Warren, "People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here's the painful part: They're right. The system is rigged." Warren said that Wall Street CEOs "wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs" and that they "still strut around congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them."

Native American ancestry controversy

In April 2012, the Boston Herald sparked an election controversy when it drew attention to Warren's Association of American Law Schools (AALS) directory entries from 1986 to 1995, which listed her as a minority professor. According to the AALS, the directory was compiled by information supplied by law school deans, based on questionnaires filled out by individual teachers. Warren stated that she had self-identified as having Native American ancestry in order to meet others with a similar background. Harvard Law School had listed her as a minority professor in response to criticisms about a lack of faculty diversity, but Warren said that she was unaware of this until she read about it in a newspaper during the 2012 election.

Her opponent Scott Brown speculated that she had fabricated a native ancestry to gain an advantage in the employment market; the Brown campaign used Warren's lineage in several attack ads. In response, Warren's brothers issued a joint statement stating that they "grew up listening to our mother and grandmother and other relatives talk about our family's Cherokee and Delaware heritage". Brian Leiter of the Chicago Law School dismissed the allegations against Warren, noting that law schools have "no pressure to hire Native Americans for affirmative action reasons", and that Warren's record of scholarship was "clearly sufficient to get her appointed at Harvard". Several Brown staffers mocked Warren by doing the "tomahawk chop" at a Brown campaign rally, which Brown said he did not condone.

According to the New England Historical Genealogical Society, several members of Warren's maternal family claim Cherokee heritage; the Society found a family newsletter that alluded to a marriage license application that listed Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great grandmother as a Cherokee, but could not find the primary document and found no proof of Warren's Native American heritage. The Oklahoma Historical Society stated that finding a definitive answer about Native American heritage can be difficult because of intermarriage and deliberate avoidance of registration. Some members of the Cherokee Nation protested her claim to Native American ancestry and questioned whether she benefitted from it. Former colleagues and supervisors at the universities where she had worked (including Charles Fried, former Solicitor General under President Ronald Reagan) said Warren's ancestry was either not mentioned, or played no role in her hiring.

The question of Warren's ancestry was pressed by the Brown campaign throughout the election. However, polls showed that most voters said that the controversy would not impact their vote in the election. Warren's 2014 autobiography devoted a section to the allegations, describing them as untrue and hurtful.

Debates

Both candidates agreed to four televised debates, three of which were held. The candidates agreed to a fourth debate which was to be held on October 30 in WGBH-TV's studio, hosted by a Boston media^B consortium, and moderated by John King, but the day before both pulled out due to Hurricane Sandy. Victoria Kennedy, widow of Ted Kennedy, had proposed an additional debate with Tom Brokaw as moderator, however Brown would only accept the invitation if she pledged not to endorse Brown's opponent; which she refused.

Debate 1: September 20 at WBZ-TV studio, hosted by WBZ and WBZ Newsradio 1030. Moderated by the station's political reporter Jon Keller.

Debate 2: October 1 at UMass Lowell, co-hosted by UMass and The Boston Herald. Moderated by David Gregory.

Debate 3: October 10 at Springfield Symphony Hall, hosted by a Western Massachusetts^A consortium. Moderated by WGBY-TV's Jim Madigan.

Fundraising

The election cost approximately $82 million, making it the most expensive election in Massachusetts' history and of any Congressional race in history as well as the second-most expensive election in the 2012 election cycle, behind only the 2012 presidential election.

The People's Pledge

Both Warren and Brown stated early in the race that they would not accept television advertisement assistance from Super PACs and interest groups. On January 23, 2012, both candidates signed the agreement, or People's Pledge. While no outside groups were obligated by the agreement, both candidates agreed to donate a sum equal to 50% of an advertisement run by any groups to a charity of the other candidate's choice. The pledge was broken twice, by Brown supporters. In March the American Petroleum Institute and Coalition of Americans for Political Equality launched ads supporting Brown, and as a result, the Brown campaign agreed to make donations of $1,000 and $34,545, respectively, to the charity of Warren's choice: the Autism Consortium.

Top donors

Source: Center for Responsive Politics

Source: Center for Responsive Politics

Polling

* RV= Registered voters; LV= Likely voters

Results

Despite President Obama's winning the state easily, and winning all of the state's counties, this race was fairly close. As expected, Warren performed very well in Suffolk County, which is home to the state's largest city and its capital Boston. Brown performed well in the southern part of the state near Cape Cod. Warren made history by becoming the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate in the state of Massachusetts.

Aftermath

The People's Pledge was a popular concept, which Common Cause proposed being implemented in other races. The pledge also resulted in fewer attack ads on the airwaves.

Less than two months after the election, President Barack Obama nominated Senator John Kerry to become United States Secretary of State. Kerry was sworn in on February 1, making newly inaugurated Warren the state's senior Senator, and the Senate's most-junior senior senator. In the Senate special election to replace Kerry the following year, Democratic nominee Ed Markey asked his Republican rival Gabriel E. Gomez to sign a similar pledge with him, although Gomez refused.

The election was a critical event in both candidates' political careers, with Warren becoming a political icon after entering the Senate, and being drafted to run for President in 2016. After the election loss, Brown was considered the most prominent Republican in Massachusetts and heavily favored to run in the Senate special election the following year or for Governor in 2014, though he declined to do either. He instead moved to New Hampshire and ran for the Senate there in 2014 against Democratic incumbent Jeanne Shaheen. He lost, 51% to 48%, becoming the first man to lose two Senate races to women.