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McQuilken vs. Romney
BY ADAM REILLY
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Somewhere in the greater Washington, DC, area, Cheryl Jacques must be smiling. When Jacques announced last year that she was leaving her Norfolk, Bristol, and Middlesex state Senate seat to lead the Washington-based gay-rights group Human Rights Campaign, she urged her constituents to select Angus McQuilken, her chief of staff, as her replacement. They seem to be heeding her advice. On Wednesday, the 34-year-old Millis resident easily topped his competitors in the Democratic primary for Jacques’s seat, garnering 48 percent of the vote and finishing far ahead of his five competitors. (McQuilken’s closest competitor, Needham businessman Rich Gatto, tallied only 17 percent.) Late Wednesday evening, McQuilken sounded unsurprised by his substantial margin of victory. "We went into primary day knowing exactly where our support was going to come from," he said. "We had a lot of identified supporters — our job was to get those voters to the polls, and we did that. The credit goes to my volunteers." McQuilken’s biggest challenge is yet to come, however. Before he can take Jacques’s place, he’ll need to defeat State Representative Scott Brown, who has strong backing from Governor Mitt Romney and the Massachusetts Republican Party. (Brown easily dispatched his primary opponent, Earl Henry Sholley, a two-time opponent of Jacques’s who made much of her sexual orientation in his campaigns.) Romney has emphasized his desire to elect more Republicans to the state House and Senate, and it’s a sure bet that the battle between McQuilken and Brown will be fierce — particularly in a district where a majority of voters identify as independents. The outcome of the special election, which will take place March 2, will be a key indicator of just how viable Romney’s goal of augmenting the Republican presence on Beacon Hill really is.
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