For Republican leaders in Massachusetts who are trying to find a credible candidate to challenge Senator Elizabeth Warren, the timing couldn’t have been worse.

The image that has dominated the front page and TV news in recent days was devastating: Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell silencing Warren as she attempted to read a letter on the Senate floor written 30 years earlier by civil rights icon Coretta Scott King.

The dramatic blow-up in a late-night Senate session came just as the Massachusetts GOP is holding conversations with potential candidates to run against the state’s senior senator in her first re-election bid. And McConnell’s attack only reinforced Warren’s iconic standing among Democrats, both across the nation and among her Massachusetts constituents, who consider her one of the party’s most effective voices to counter Donald Trump’s presidency and to battle the Republicans in Congress.


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