BOSTON – The three Republicans competing for the right to take on Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a fight for Massachusetts’s U.S. Senate seat debated which of them was a “real” Republican rather than a “RINO” – Republican In Name Only. The GOP candidates met in their only TV debate at the WBZ-TV studios.

Will the candidates support Donald Trump?

Each candidate was asked if they will support Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as he aims to return to the White House.

“The big differentiating litmus test is whether someone supports the head of the ticket, which is why I’m wearing this hat,” said engineer Robert Antonellis, pointing to his bright red Make America Great Again hat. “I’m the one on the stage here who plans to vote for Donald Trump in November, and he’s the head of the ticket.”

“For me, this is about pro-growth,” said Quincy City Council President Ian Cain, who acknowledged being an unenrolled voter and a registered Democrat at times in the past. “This is about getting back to respect and rule of law. This is back to smaller government.”

“People ask, ‘Are you a Donald Trump Republican, John, or are you a Charlie Baker Republican?’ And my answer is always, ‘I’m a John Deaton Republican,’” said John Deaton, an attorney who has also been registered as a Democrat and an independent. “When I get to the United States Senate, I’m going to have one test, and that is, is it good for Massachusetts and America? If it is, I’m all in; it doesn’t matter who the president is.”

Border Security

The candidates were asked how they would have voted on last winter’s bipartisan budget deal to tighten border security that died in Congress without a vote after Senate Republicans answered Trump’s call to kill it.

Deaton said he would have voted for the bill “because it stopped the bleeding. It’s not a perfect bill…[but] James Lankford was voted number two most conservative United States Senator, and he wrote that bill. It’s not perfect, but you have to stop the bleeding, and that’s what I mean by loyalty – loyalty to the Constitution of the country, not a person, not a party.”

Antonellis disagreed. “It was a red herring. No wonder John supports it. Donald Trump was against it. It could be solved with a phone call from the White House. In other words, all the executive orders that Biden signed mere moments after taking the pen in the White House, January 20, he unraveled that border, and Donald Trump could fix it immediately. … And how many transgender bathrooms were in that bill? We don’t even know. They put all kinds of stuff into these bills.”

Cain also said he would not have supported what he called “a Chuck Schumer progressive open border bill” because it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. “If you talk to voters across Massachusetts, irrespective of their party affiliation, illegal immigration is the number one issue on their minds. People are looking for, again, a sensible solution to closing the border, adjudicating the backlog of illegal immigrants that have arrived here to this country, ending the catch-and-release program, and then figuring out how to get back to a normal, legal immigration pathway for people that want to come here the right way.”

Taking on Elizabeth Warren

The candidates sparred on other issues, but on one topic there was solidarity.

“Elizabeth Warren has her fingerprints on every single horrible deed, everything coming from the White House, and so she is very complicit in the destruction of our society that we’re all living through today,” said Antonellis. “So whether it’s the border collapse, whether it’s crime, whether it’s inflation, whether it’s the attack on womanhood, or even the attack on our environment … she has been absolutely directly involved with.”

“She has been one of the most divisive members of the U.S. Senate since her time there. She is actually not only part of the reason that Washington is frozen, but she’s part of the reason why we’re deeply divided,” said Cain. “She uses her partisanship and her extreme partisanship to divide people. She pits people against identity. She pits classes against each other.”

Added Deaton: “She’s great at fighting against the rich and the wealthy. That is not the same as fighting for the poor and the middle class. I want to uplift people. I want to bring people up, expand the middle class, bring people out of poverty, like I brought myself out of poverty… I can do that without tearing people down… and she is the queen of finger-pointing politics.”

You can watch the debate in its entirety by clicking in the video player above.