After a month of floundering, Elizabeth Warren, the embattled Senate candidate in Massachusetts, gained the endorsement of the state Democratic Party on Saturday and avoided a party runoff in her race against Senator Scott P. Brown in November.
“It’s a long way from Ted Kennedy to Scott Brown,” Ms. Warren said in a feisty speech here on Saturday to the roughly 3,500 delegates to the state convention, invoking the name of the lionized Democrat. Mr. Kennedy’s death in 2009 led to the special election in which Mr. Brown won the seat.
She also dismissed the controversy in which her campaign has been mired for more than a month — whether she unfairly claimed American Indian ancestry to advance her academic career.
“If that’s all you’ve got, Scott Brown, I’m ready,” she declared to cheers. “And let me be clear. I am not backing down. I didn’t get in this race to fold up the first time I got punched.”
It was a foregone conclusion that Ms. Warren, who has been widely perceived as the presumptive nominee, would win the endorsement. The question was how many votes her rival, Marisa DeFranco, would receive. Ms. DeFranco, an immigration lawyer, needed 15 percent of the vote to earn a spot on the ballot.
Party officials said that in the last 30 years, no candidate had achieved the 86 percent of the vote that Ms. Warren would need to keep Ms. DeFranco off the ballot, all but guaranteeing Ms. Warren a primary fight that could divert some of her time, money and attention from the race against Mr. Brown.
But the pro-Warren forces, including those of Gov. Deval Patrick, lobbied the delegates intensively, arguing that they needed all their firepower focused on Mr. Brown. And in the end, the delegates agreed, denying Ms. DeFranco a spot on the ballot by giving her less than 5 percent of the vote and sending Ms. Warren into the general election unencumbered.
“I’m ready,” Ms. Warren told the conventioneers after the vote was announced. She asked the delegates if they were ready to take on Wall Street, big oil and to “stop the Republicans from taking over the United States Senate.” A huge cheer went up in the cavernous hall.
Ms. Warren began the day with some good news with two new polls — from The Boston Globe and from Western New England University — showing her running essentially even with Mr. Brown.
In recent days, Ms. Warren has taken more aggressive steps to try to counteract the fallout from the ancestry issue and criticism of her campaign for failing to respond to the controversy more quickly and fully. Gov. Deval Patrick, one of the state’s most popular politicians, broke his pledge to stay neutral in the Democratic contest and endorsed her a few days ago.
Ms. Warren, who had been nonresponsive to the news media for weeks, also called Brian McGrory, an influential columnist for The Boston Globe, and spoke to him for 30 minutes. The Globe, and Mr. McGrory, had become more pointed in their questioning of Ms. Warren and the details of how Harvard, where she teaches, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she used to teach, had come to portray her as a minority. The paper’s readers tend to be more liberal than those of the anti-Warren Boston Herald and represent a crucial demographic group that Ms. Warren cannot afford to lose if she hopes to win the election.
She did not answer all of Mr. McGrory’s questions but seemed to win a few points for talking to him at length.
Ms. Warren has also been demonstrating a new defiance. On Friday night, she made the requisite rounds of pubs and parties here packed with the activists whose enthusiasm she will need to get out the vote in November.
“I don’t care what they throw at me,” Ms. Warren said in a near shout to the activists gathered in Theodore’s blues club. “I will stand my ground.”
This article, "," first appeared in The New York Times.