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Republican Taunton City Councilor Kelly Dooner garnered strong support in her home city and rode a conservative surge to flip the Third Bristol & Plymouth state Senate seat held by the same Democrat since 1993.
With a campaign focused on immigration and the cost of living, Dooner, 32, topped Raynham Selectman Joe Pacheco, a longtime local public servant who was endorsed by the state political establishment, by a margin of 49% to 46%, according to a preliminary count of votes cast for the candidates, not including blank ballots.
Independent candidate Jim DuPont, a former Raynham selectman, finished with 5%.
Unofficial returns show Dooner with 45,251, Pacheco with 43,355 and DuPont with 4,647.
Dooner — who will succeed Sen. Marc Pacheco, who was elected in 1992 — on Wednesday said in a statement that she was eager to get to work on Beacon Hill.
“I’m extremely thrilled and honored to be the Senator-Elect,” Dooner said. “I believe that our positive message focusing on helping people’s wallets and ending the costly migrant crisis resonated with voters. I am looking forward to getting to work on legislation and helping the people of the district.”
Dooner added that she is “proud to be the first woman to ever serve in the Senate from this district.”
Late Wednesday morning, Joe Pacheco — no family relation to the incumbent senator — said he had called Dooner to congratulate her a few hours earlier. He said he was not ready to comment on the outcome, and would rely on a one-paragraph statement he posted to Facebook this morning.
“While it’s not the outcome I had hoped for, I am honored to have had the chance to run and I am proud that the ideas and goals our campaign carried were meaningful to many,” Pacheco wrote. “Please know how grateful I am to have met so many new friends along the way. To all those who held a sign, took a bumper sticker, volunteered in any capacity – thank you. To those who entrusted me with their vote, know I will never forget it.”
Preliminary results show that of the 10 communities in the district, Dooner took six Republican-leaning towns: Rehoboth, Seekonk, Dighton, Berkeley, Carver, and Middleborough.
She ran up margins that Pacheco could not overcome in winning Taunton, Raynham, Marion, and Wareham. In Wareham, for instance, which leans Democratic, he won by fewer than 80 votes, the unofficial results show.
Dooner, who works as a paralegal at a Boston law firm, staked her campaign on two issues that have been urgent in local and national politics: immigration and the cost of living.
She told the Taunton Daily Gazette in the summer that she was propelled into the race by her outrage at the money the state was spending on emergency shelter for migrants. She considered the state’s cost outrageous — estimated at up to $1 billion so far — and promised to revise the state’s so-called “right to shelter” law.
The law adopted in 1983, after psychiatric hospital closings left more people homeless, was meant to protect children. Gov. Maura Healey has said that the migrant surge has stretched the state’s ability to meet the legal requirements.
Dooner said the emergency shelter was just one example of why state spending should be better managed.
Dooner said she wants to press for lower property taxes, and, in written answers to questions from The Light, she noted that she has worked on the council to double the local tax credit for older residents. She said that as a senator, she would stand against new state taxes, as part of an effort to curb the cost of living. She said she wanted to cut the sales tax from 6.25% to 5%, and control utility costs.
Pacheco, who comes from a family with a tradition of public service in Raynham, had been endorsed by Gov. Healey, State Auditor Diana DiZoglio, all four living former Taunton mayors and the incumbent, Sen. Marc Pacheco.
Pacheco had stressed his “centrist” politics and his years of government service at the town, county and state levels.
Along with serving as selectman since 2007 and as director of the Barnstable Department of Social Services since 2021, he worked as a legislative aide for the late former state Rep. David Flynn and for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services.
DuPont, 71, retired from the Massachusetts Department of Revenue’s Litigation Bureau, focused mostly on lowering taxes and the need to boost state aid to communities.
Sen. Pacheco — who previously served four years in the state House of Representatives — represented a district from the New Bedford outskirts to the Rhode Island line where politics runs purple.
The district backed former President Donald Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris Tuesday night.
In 2016 and 2020, with elections under the previous boundary lines — including Bridgewater in Plymouth County, but not Rehoboth and Seekonk in Bristol — the district backed Trump in 2016 and President Joe Biden in 2020.
With the new lines in 2022, the district’s six Bristol communities — Taunton, Berkley, Dighton, Seekonk, Raynham and Rehoboth — all backed the conservative Republican Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson when he lost to the Democrat Paul Heroux in 2022. Hodgson this year served as Trump’s Massachusetts campaign chairman.
On her campaign website, Dooner says she’ll work to curb “rampant fraud” involving Electronic Benefits Transfer cards used to provide state food benefits, and stop the use of EBT cards outside the state. She said she wanted to see tougher standards for benefits, including restoring work requirements, and demanding more verification of income and assets.
For his part, Pacheco also touted the budget-conscious approach he’s taken to town spending since he was elected a selectman in 2007. He called himself a “fiscal conservative,” and noted that the most recent Raynham budget increase of just over 1% shows his work in managing spending.
At a candidates’ forum in October, according to the Taunton Daily Gazette, Pacheco said there was little disagreement between him, Dooner and DuPont on state spending on migrants. He also said he wanted the law changed to give priority for shelter and services to veterans, seniors, and victims of domestic violence over migrants.
As a senator, Dooner said she would work for more transparency in state government. She wants to see the state publish amounts in lawsuit payouts, and end the legislative exemption from the open meeting law and the public records law.
Email reporter Arthur Hirsch at ahirsch@newbedfordlight.org.
