Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Republican John F. Kennedy Democratic The 1952 United States Senate election in Massachusetts was held on November 4, 1952, in which Incumbent Republican Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. lost to Congressman and future President John F. Kennedy, the Democratic Party nominee.

The 1952 Massachusetts Senate election was a contest between two representatives of New England's most prominent political families: the Republican Lodges and the Democratic Kennedys.

The Lodges were a much older political dynasty; the family could trace its roots to the original Puritan pioneers who had first settled the state in the early seventeenth century.

Lodge's Democratic opponent in the 1952 Senate race was three-term Congressman John F. Kennedy, then only 35 years old.

The Kennedys were Irish Catholics, and in many ways the 1952 Massachusetts Senate campaign was the climax of a longstanding battle between the older Protestant families like the Lodges, who had controlled politics in Massachusetts for generations, and the newer Irish Catholic families such as the Kennedys, who for demographic reasons now outnumbered the Protestants.

Kennedy launched his campaign early in 1952 and made an intensive effort, by election day in November 1952 he had visited every city, town, and village in Massachusetts at least once.

Instead, he focused on persuading Dwight D. Eisenhower, the popular World War II general, to run for and win the Republican presidential nomination over Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, the leader of the party's conservatives.

[citation needed] The nationally-known and Catholic Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin refused to campaign for Lodge, a fellow Republican, due to his friendship with the Kennedy family.