MassLive
By Douglas Hook
Rep. Stephen Lynch won by landslide for his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives against Independent challenger Jonathan Lott.
Shortly before 1:02 a.m., Lynch sealed his win with 80.73% of the vote compared to Lott’s 19.27%. The Associated Press called the election with 72.51% of the total vote counted.
With 215,151 votes so far for Lynch, to Lott’s 51,360, AP called the race at 1:02 a.m. with 182 precincts counted of 251.
Lynch, previously served in the Massachusetts House and state Senate, has served in Congress since 2001. A former ironworker and union leader, Lynch later became a labor and employment attorney from Boston College Law School and is facing a challenge by the Independent candidate Lott.
In addition to spearheading efforts to get PPE to hospitals, community health centers, nursing homes and front-line workers fighting the COVID-19 pandemic in his district, Lynch has worked to obtain grants for various programs and initiatives in his district.
This includes $2 million for seawall fortification in Quincy, $1.7 million to assist in affordable housing for low-income and first-time homebuyers and $1.5 million HUD loan Guarantee for the city’s Downtown Restaurant Infrastructure fund.
In the 2001 special election, Lynch won the District 8 seat following the death of longtime U.S. Rep. John Moakley. In 2012, District 8 was redrawn, and Lynch decided to run winning the election and winning the seat. He also ran for the Democratic nomination in the 2013 U.S. Senate election to fill the seat of former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry but lost to U.S. Sen. Ed Markey.
Lynch is facing a challenge by Independent candidate Lott, who has majored in English and Classical Civilization from the University of Vermont. After graduating in 2014, Lott has been teaching Latin.
Lott expressed the issue with the two-party system in the U.S. stating that it has become polarizing and anti-intellectual.
“Being an independent candidate means that I don’t fully align with any political party,” said Lott on his website. “You probably won’t agree 100% with all my positions, and that’s fine. I respect that we all have diverse beliefs but coming together on common ground is much better than magnifying wedge issues to further divide us.”
Issues like desertification, food shortages, civil unrest, drought, forced migration, ocean acidification and other downstream factors are all problems he hopes to address if elected on Nov. 3.
“Politicians often claim climate change is an emergency, but none actually treat it like the existential issue it is,” Lott states.
Three-quarters of registered voters in Massachusetts cast ballots in the 2016 election in what Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin then characterized as “record turnout.”
In 2016, 3.4 million people voted out of 4.5 million registered voters, representing a turnout of 75%. That beat turnout levels in each of the last two presidential election years, both of which were 73%.
However, 2020 saw more than 3.6 million ballots in the presidential election, breaking the record, said Galvin.
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