olling up one of the biggest margins of victory in his 38-year career, US Senator Edward M. Kennedy easily won reelection yesterday to a seventh term after the most lackluster Senate campaign in Massachusetts history.
As the polls closed at 8 last night, Kennedy was projected to win by a huge percentage over his rivals, beleaguered Republican Jack E. Robinson and Libertarian candidate Carla Howell.
With his wife, Victoria, and other family members at a Boston hotel, Kennedy celebrated his continued tenure in the Senate, where he has served for nearly four decades and has risen to third in seniority.
''I look foward to returning to the United States Senate to fight for our shared values, our common concerns, and better life for our working families and the middle class,'' Kennedy told a ballroom of supporters who had come to watch the presidential returns and cheer his easy reelection.
Despite the crushing defeat, Robinson remained upbeat. ''It's tough to lose these squeakers, isn't it?'' he quipped.
Though Robinson said he would return to the business world ''in the short term,'' he hinted that he may hit the campaign trail again soon.
''I'm not bitter; it's politics,'' he said. ''I'll move on. Who knows? I may be back again. In the words of General Douglas McArthur, I shall return.''
Kennedy's overwhelming victory in this campaign is second only to his 1964 reelection, when he won his first full six-year term with 72 percent of the vote. He spent that campaign in a Boston hospital recuperating from a broken back suffered in a plane accident. It also came a year after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, had been assasinated.
Kennedy, first elected to the Senate in 1962 at age 30 to complete the Senate term vacated after his brother won the presidency, has returned to Capitol Hill over the years by winning as much as 72 percent of the vote in that 1964 race and as little as 57 percent in 1994.
He never appeared threatened in this campaign.
Robinson, a successful businessman who grew up in Jamaica Plain, caught the GOP's attention by pledging to use his own wealth to run against Kennedy. But he lost the backing of state party leaders after embarrassing reports of his personal life surfaced.
With the only serious challenge coming from Howell, an underfinanced Libertarian Party candidate, Kennedy kept an extremely low profile.
This year's race was extremely quiet. For most of the race, the 68-year old incumbent remained in Washington and only occasionally traveled to Massachusetts for campaign appearances.
The only controversy in the race surfaced in mid-October, when Kennedy announced that he would not debate his opponents. He said that Senate business was keeping him too busy and that he would rather spend his trips to Massachusetts meeting voters.
The move drew fire from his opponents and several of the state's media outlets. But with little public interest in the race and even less outrage over his decision, Kennedy was not hurt politically.
Kennedy came closest to losing his seat in 1994 when GOP candidate Mitt Romney used his own fortune to mount a spirited challenge and at times seemed poised to pull an upset. But Kennedy poured millions of dollars into the race and captured 57 percent of the vote.
This year, led by Governor Paul Cellucci, Republicans had tried to recruit a serious candidate: Plymouth District Attorney Michael Sullivan. Sullivan seemed ready to take on Kennedy, but backed out after it became apparent he could not raise enough money to run a serious campaign.
His decision was prompted in part by Robinson, who was unknown to state GOP leaders but emerged in March, pledging to spend up to $1 million of his fortune for the campaign.
But Robinson was soon reeling from headlines about his not-too-distant scrapes with the law - including a sexual assault charge filed by a former girlfriend and an arrest for drunken driving and carrying a martial-arts tool, considered a dangerous weapon. Both charges were eventually dropped.
Cellucci and the Republican Party withdrew their support, but Robinson persisted.
Globe correspondent Daniel Barbarisi contributed to this story.
