Scott Brown

WASHINGTON - Scott Brown, defeated last November in a marquee election battle for a Massachusetts Senate seat by Elizabeth Warren, has opted against seeking a return to Congress this June in the special election to replace John F. Kerry. The Republican revealed his decision in a text message to a Boston Herald reporter Friday , the same day Kerry officially resigns from the Senate to become secretary of State. Brown shocked the political world with his 2010 upset victory to claim the seat that had been held by the late Edward M. Kennedy.

WASHINGTON - The race to replace John F. Kerry in the U.S. Senate will offer Massachusetts voters a familiar choice: a longtime Democratic officeholder against a fresh-faced Republican. Democratic Rep. Edward J. Markey and Republican businessman Gabriel Gomez won their respective party nominations in a special primary election Tuesday, after a campaign overshadowed in the closing weeks by the Boston Marathon bombings. Markey defeated fellow congressman Stephen Lynch, according to the Associated Press, while Gomez, a political novice, defeated former U.S. Atty.

With two words, Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown launched himself into controversy Thursday morning when he joked about being glad that Elizabeth Warren, his likely Democratic opponent in 2012, had never posed in the nude. Brown was responding to a quip Warren made at a Democratic debate Tuesday.  Asked how she had paid for college - compared with Brown, who once posed partially nude for Cosmopolitan - Warren said: “I kept my clothes on.” Brown fired back during an interview onBoston radio station WZLX: “Thank God!

WASHINGTON - Scott Brown, defeated last November in a marquee election battle for a Massachusetts Senate seat by Elizabeth Warren, has opted against seeking a return to Congress this June in the special election to replace John F. Kerry. The Republican revealed his decision in a text message to a Boston Herald reporter Friday , the same day Kerry officially resigns from the Senate to become secretary of State. Brown shocked the political world with his 2010 upset victory to claim the seat that had been held by the late Edward M. Kennedy.

MassachusettsSen. Scott Brownhas picked up the endorsement of outgoingSen. Olympia Snowe, the Republican senator from Maine who last week scolded the chamber for becoming a “parrallel universe” of extreme partisanship. The endorsement from Snowe, known as one of the Senate's last moderates, could help Brown in his effort to win reelection nearly three years after he swept into office on the tea party wave. Anticipating a challenge from consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren, Brown has been campaigning as “an independent voice.” In her endorsement statement, Snowe echoed the slogan, praising Brown for his “independent spirit and bipartisan outlook.” “Like me, he approaches each issue with an open mind and is always willing to reach across the aisle to build bridges and find common ground,” Snowe said in a statement posted to Brown's campaign website.

Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, whose upset victory in early 2010 marked the moment when many started to take the tea party movement seriously, leads his likely 2012 Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren by 9 percentage points, according to a new survey of voters. Brown has 49% support compared with Warren's 40%, according to a Suffolk University poll released Thursday. Warren, whose reputation as a consumer advocate has made her the darling of progressive activists, holds a commanding lead over her Democratic challengers for the party's nomination, which will be decided in the primary election Sept.

Republican Sen. Scott Brown's office is blaming a staff error for what appears to be borrowed text on the Massachusetts senator's official website. A spokesman says inspirational text that once appeared on the website of former North Carolina Sen. Elizabeth Dole landed on Brown's site by accident. "Sen. Dole's website served as one of the models for Sen. Brown's website when he first took office," said John Donnelly. "During construction of the site, the content on this particular page was inadvertently transferred without being rewritten.

New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is throwing his support behind Sen. Scott Brown's bid for reelection, giving a boost to the Massachusetts Republican who faces a fierce opponent in Democrat Elizabeth Warren. Bloomberg will host a fundraiser for Brown on Aug. 15, according to an invitation first reported by Politico. Brown, who swept into office in 2010 as a darling of the tea party movement, has carefully cast himself as a centrist senator who isn't afraid to buck the party establishment.

Republican Sen. Scott Brown has come out against Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan and its proposed overhaul of Medicare, a move that further exposes the deep divisions within the GOP over the proposal. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this story said Susan Collins was up for reelection next year. She's next up in 2014. In an Op-Ed article in Politico, Brown, from Massachusetts, said he couldn’t support Ryan’s plan because it would force seniors to pick up too much of the burden for rising healthcare costs.

In spite of the attention paid to the controversy over Elizabeth Warren's purported Native American heritage, the Democratic Senate hopeful has tightened the race against incumbent Sen. Scott Brown, according to new polling. The race is now well within the margin of error of the latest Suffolk University/7NEWS poll , with Brown holding a single point lead over Warren, 48% to 47%, with 5% of voters undecided. The numbers show a steady rise for Warren, who in February was 9 points behind Brown, 49% to 40%. “This leaves both campaigns no choice but to spend tens of millions of dollars in an all-out war to woo the 5% of voters who will decide this election,” David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, said.

Los Angeles City Councilman Eric Garcetti's call last week for a "People's Pledge" - to limit spending by outside groups in the mayor's race - hails from Massachusetts, where a similar pact got mixed reviews from the Boston Globe. The Boston newspaper editorialized after the recent U.S. Senate showdown between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown that an agreement between the candidates tamped down so-called independent expenditures. But one of the newspaper's columnists, Jeff Jacoby, said the pact, which required the candidates to counter any outside spending on their behalf by sending half the amount in a donation to charity, limited third-party spending only to a point.

WASHINGTON - Elizabeth Warren defeated Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown in a marquee race for a seat that was crucial to Republican hopes of gaining control of the Senate. It was one of the most-watched campaigns of the year, with Warren, the Democrats' consumer activist icon, against Brown, the Republican who shocked everyone in 2010 when he won the seat that had been occupied for decades by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. In a year in which most races across the country had featured Democrats casting Republicans as extremists, this one turned that narrative on its head.

One of the tightest Senate races in the country is nearing its conclusion, with super storm Sandy canceling Tuesday's debate between the deadlocked Sen. Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren. The expensive Massachusetts race , pitting the liberal icon Warren against the self-described independent incumbent, has already played host to three earlier debates, but with Sandy battering the state, both campaigns opted to miss their final opportunity to fight face-to-face.

MELROSE, Mass. - Wall Street's philosophy in one of the nation's most hotly contested Senate campaigns could be boiled down to an old proverb: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The financial industry has poured more than $6.2 million in contributions into the U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts between incumbent Republican Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren, who has made the fight against Wall Street greed and corruption a cornerstone of her campaign. Nearly $9 of every $10 have gone to Brown, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The gloves are officially off in one of the most tightly contested Senate races of the year, with Sen. Scott Brown bringing personal attacks to the forefront of his campaign against Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts. Brown, who recently has fallen behind Warren in several polls, once again targeted the issue of her Native American heritage with a campaign ad released Monday. The new ad, “Who Knows?” combines a series of news clips about the revelation that Warren was listed as a minority in a Harvard Law School directory, and speculation that she attempted to use her claimed heritage for her own gain.

NEW YORK -- She's been accused of dressing like a schoolmarm, wagging her finger too often and misstating her Native American roots. But for the first time in a long time, Elizabeth Warren seems to be winning over voters in her race against incumbent Scott Brown for a U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts. Warren overtook Brown for the first time in this race in a poll from Suffolk University/7NEWS released late Monday. She leads 48% to 44%, within the poll's margin of error. In February, Brown was up by nine points in the same poll, and by one point in May. It's a lead that could be bolstered - or shattered - by the first televised debate between the two, which occurs Thursday night.

For residents of this picturesque New England town, Scott Brown's exercise routine was a familiar sight -- steady and symbolic of the man himself. He could be seen running down the main drag -- past the hardware store that sells brown eggs, past the bakery with the pumpkin whoopie pies -- almost every day. No headphones. Occasionally with his daughter. Always with purpose. "Running, not jogging," said Nabil Shehata, the owner of a pizza and subs place in the center of this Boston bedroom community.

Republican candidates for Congress are latching onto Scott Brown's bolt-from-the-blue win this week in the Massachusetts Senate race, with political outsiders and longtime office-holders alike casting themselves in a similar mold -- or seeing him in their image. Brown was a fairly obscure state senator who shocked the Democratic favorite, Martha Coakley, in the race to replace the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) by employing a tightly focused, populist, anti- Washington message.

New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is throwing his support behind Sen. Scott Brown's bid for reelection, giving a boost to the Massachusetts Republican who faces a fierce opponent in Democrat Elizabeth Warren. Bloomberg will host a fundraiser for Brown on Aug. 15, according to an invitation first reported by Politico. Brown, who swept into office in 2010 as a darling of the tea party movement, has carefully cast himself as a centrist senator who isn't afraid to buck the party establishment.

In spite of the attention paid to the controversy over Elizabeth Warren's purported Native American heritage, the Democratic Senate hopeful has tightened the race against incumbent Sen. Scott Brown, according to new polling. The race is now well within the margin of error of the latest Suffolk University/7NEWS poll , with Brown holding a single point lead over Warren, 48% to 47%, with 5% of voters undecided. The numbers show a steady rise for Warren, who in February was 9 points behind Brown, 49% to 40%. “This leaves both campaigns no choice but to spend tens of millions of dollars in an all-out war to woo the 5% of voters who will decide this election,” David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, said.