Warren and Deaton clashed in two Senate debates: What we learned

Here are three things we learned from watching the contestants over the last week.

On Thursday, Warren and Deaton argued about supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia.

Warren, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: “Anyone who thinks we can just turn our backs on Ukraine…” . . just kidding.” She argued that Vladimir Putin would not stop at Ukraine if the US did not support the fight against Russia.

“He comes for Poland, he comes for Estonia. He comes for the other nations in Europe,” she said. She added that Deaton had said he would not support funding for Ukraine, a comment he immediately dismissed as “not true.”

Deaton said that he was not automatically against supporting Ukraine, but that his “vote had to be earned” and that the American public did not have enough information about the strategy behind supporting Ukraine.

“I don’t have the information that Senator Warren is getting, but I want to know what the plan is,” he said.

In his response, Deaton said the money spent in Ukraine could have been spent on early education or expanding Medicaid coverage for American citizens. He called members of Congress “warmongers in Washington” and said their strategy was not a well-thought-out plan but “a hope” and “a wish.”

He quoted rapper Tupac Shakur: “They have money for war, but they can’t feed the poor.”

During the debates, Deaton repeatedly asserted that he was a moderate candidate and took a more liberal stance on issues such as abortion, as he sought to take a position once held by former Gov. Charlie Baker, a wildly popular Republican in this leaning blue state.

“There is only one extremist on this stage tonight, and that is Elizabeth Warren,” he said Tuesday. “I am the moderate, centrist candidate with common sense.”

But while he runs as an “anti-Trump Republican,” his tone often reflects the more aggressive and outspoken tones he prefers from former President Donald Trump and other national Republicans. He called Warren’s criticism of his immigration policies “crazy.” At one point, while claiming that Warren had lied about his past, he referred to her as a “75-year-old grandmother.” And while talking about bipartisanship, he told Warren, “They’re all bad in Congress.”

While answering a question about cryptocurrency on Tuesday, he also appeared to suggest, without evidence, that Warren’s donors and “people she knows” were connected to Jeffrey Epstein, an accused sex trafficker.

For her part, Warren mostly just ignored Deaton’s more tangential attacks and used her time to try to link Deaton to Trump. During Tuesday’s debate, for example, she said that Deaton’s immigration position “may have a nicer face,” but it was still a “page from the same playbook” as Trump.

Deaton has stated that he does not plan to vote for Trump and hinted that he might endorse Baker as a presidential candidate instead. It’s not certain whether the support will be reciprocated: While Baker has voted in a handful of local elections since leaving office, he has not endorsed it in the Senate race.

In the “all politics is local” category, Warren made a splash when she announced during Tuesday’s debate that she plans to vote for a ballot measure that would eliminate Massachusetts’ only uniform high school diploma requirement. Question 2 is the teachers union-backed measure to repeal the state mandate that students pass their 10th grade MCAS exams.

That position puts her in stark contrast to some of the state’s top Democrats, including Gov. Maura Healey, Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll and Attorney General Andrea Campbell, who support maintaining the requirement.

Warren’s opponent Deaton, however, said he would vote “no” on Question 2 and argued in the first debate that “we can’t have 351 standards” in the state’s many cities and towns.

“If there is no MCAS and no standards, there will be people in this state who graduate from high school who cannot speak full English, and that puts them at a disadvantage,” he said.

Warren, who began her career as a special education teacher and then worked as a law professor, urged voters to listen to educators before making their decision.

“Our teachers tell us that the consequence of this test is teaching our children less because we are teaching them more about test-taking skills,” Warren said.

It’s not the first time Warren has broken ranks with other statewide elected Democrats in Massachusetts.

On immigration, Warren has taken an opposite course to Democrats like Healey, who have taken increasingly restrictive measures to address the immigration problem. Earlier this year, Warren criticized an executive order from President Biden that imposed strict limits on new asylum applications, a move by Healey supports.

“I understand President Biden’s urgency to make changes at the border, but we can — and should — do better than a functional ban on asylum,” Warren said said in June.

She also strongly opposed Democrats in leadership of the Legislature by publicly expressing support for the unionization efforts of State House staff. The push for a union has been an uphill battle because state law excludes legislative staff from the definition of public employees who can bargain collectively. Despite support from a number of lawmakers, proposed bills to allow employees to unionize failed to gain support from House and Senate leadership.

And in the last election cycle, Warren split with U.S. Rep. Healey Ayanna Pressley and Senate colleague Ed Markey endorsed labor attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan over Campbell in the Democratic primary for the seat, a move that marked one of the most contentious moments in the 2022 midterm election cycle.

The Globe’s Emma Platoff contributed to this report.

Samantha J. Gross can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @samanthajgross. Anjali Huynh can be reached at [email protected].