# John Deaton Marine veteran, crypto and business attorney, and the **2026 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts** — running unopposed in the Sept 1 primary to face the winner of the [[Ed Markey]] / [[Seth Moulton]] Democratic contest. ## Second try Deaton moved from Rhode Island to Massachusetts in 2024 and ran that year against [[Elizabeth Warren]], losing by roughly 700,000 votes. He announced the 2026 run at a bar in Worcester, this time against the state's other Democratic senator. Reporting in July 2026 framed the second campaign as an attempted reinvention, with the crypto identity deliberately de-emphasized relative to 2024. ## Crypto record Deaton's public profile was built on the **Ripple/XRP** fight: after the SEC sued Ripple Labs in 2020, he organized and advocated for XRP holders, eventually representing more than 75,000 token holders worldwide. He founded **CryptoLaw** in 2021 as a crypto legal and regulatory news hub. That history matters for how this seat is contested — his 2024 opponent Warren is the Senate's most prominent crypto skeptic, which made that race a proxy fight the industry funded. Markey is not the same foil. ## Background - Grew up poor in Detroit; wrote a memoir, *Food Stamp Warrior*, about it. - U.S. Marine Corps veteran. - Lives in Swansea; 59 as of 2026. ## Outlook Massachusetts has not elected a Republican to the Senate since [[Scott Brown]]'s 2010 special election, and Brown lost the seat to Warren two years later. Cook rates MA-Sen Solid D. Polling tested against both possible Democratic nominees showed Deaton losing to Markey, and performing better — though still losing — against Moulton. > [!warning] Stub > Created 2026-08-31 to resolve links from [[MA-Sen-2026]]. Crypto-industry funding of the 2024 and 2026 campaigns is the obvious next thing to research and is unwritten here; an FEC pull would be the right source, not secondary reporting. ## See also - [[MA-Sen-2026]] - [[Ed Markey]] - [[Elizabeth Warren]]