Massachusetts Senate Race 2018: Ayyadurai, Diehl, Warren

BOSTON — The candidates in the U.S. Senate made their way across Massachusetts in a final push for voters.

Incumbent Democrat Elizabeth Warren told a crowd Monday flipping the House and voting Democratic is vital to the preservation of health care and education funding.

Warren is heavily favored to defeat Republican Geoff Diehl, a state representative from Whitman, in what both supporters and detractors of the incumbent view as a potential warmup for a national race against Trump in 2020.

The Democrat has portrayed her opponent as someone who would vote "100 percent of the time" to support Trump's agenda. Diehl was the co-chair of Trump's 2016 campaign in Massachusetts and doesn't hide his support for the president, though has promised if elected to vote first to protect the state's interests.

Diehl has charged that Warren is already looking past her current re-election campaign and would soon abandon Massachusetts to focus on a run for the White House.

Warren, one of Trump's fiercest critics in Congress, hasn't exactly discouraged the speculation. She recently said she would take a "hard look" at running for president once the Senate election is over. And some have viewed her recent disclosure of DNA tests as an attempt to quiet the controversy — and frequent taunts from Trump — over her claims of Native American heritage.

Shiva Ayyadurai, an independent running on the slogan "only a real Indian can defeat the fake Indian," is also on the ballot.

Cox Media Group