United States Senate election in Massachusetts, 1994
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| Results by town. Red indicates towns carried by Mitt Romney, blue indicates towns carried by Ted Kennedy. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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The 1994 United States Senate election in Massachusetts was held on November 8, 1994. Incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy won re-election to his sixth full term, defeating the Republican Party nominee, businessman Mitt Romney.
Romney defeated his closest competitor, John Lakian, to win the Republican primary with over 80% of the vote. He campaigned as a political moderate and Washington outsider, and posed the greatest challenge ever made against Kennedy for the Senate seat since he first took office in 1962. Democratic congressmen across the country were struggling to maintain their seats, and Kennedy in particular was damaged by character concerns and an ongoing divorce controversy. The contest became very close.
Kennedy launched ads criticizing Romney's tenure as the leader of the company known as Bain Capital, accusing him of treating workers unfairly and taking away jobs, while also criticizing what were widely considered to be Romney's shifting political views. Romney also performed inadequately in the debates between the two candidates, and made a number of poorly received statements that reduced his standing in the polls.
In the closest Senate election of his career since after 1962, Kennedy won by a reasonably comfortable margin, despite a series of losses for Democrats around the country.
Nearly 23 years after the loss, Romney was reported to have considered a possible U.S. Senate run for the state of Utah, should long-time incumbent Orrin Hatch retire prior to the 2018 Senate election in Utah.
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