With just days left before the last voters cast their ballots in a truly divided electoral contest, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts is making clear yet again that his party affiliation does not define his candidacy.

Former military prosecutor John Deaton, who is challenging U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren as she seeks a third term as the Bay State’s senior senator, said during a pre-recorded interview aired on Sunday that he’s never voted for former President Donald Trump, despite at first liking the idea of his candidacy.

“I was excited, to be honest with you, on paper, when President Trump first announced, you know? It was someone who was an outsider, someone who had been a Democrat and a Republican. A businessman, non-partisan, who would sort of look at running the country more as an executive,” Deaton told WBZ.

That excitement was diminished, Deaton said, after the ex-commander-in-chief chose to denigrate the military service of Arizona’s late U.S. Sen. John McCain.

McCain, Deaton explained, declined release from a North Vietnamese prison camp despite an offer of freedom, because he didn’t want to leave his fellow service members behind. McCain spent five years as a prisoner of war after capture in 1967, and following his release spent the rest of his life suffering from injuries sustained through torture.

“If you know the John McCain story, he’s a hero,” Deaton said.

Trump, during his first campaign for the White House, infamously said of McCain that he wasn’t a hero just because of his time spent as a POW, and that he liked “people who weren’t captured.” That was too much, Deaton said on Sunday.

“I was really taken aback by that,” he said.

Trump also, the Republican said, brings “too much divisiveness” with him to politics. Deaton said that after growing up in a violent and hate filled environment, it’s not the sort of thing he wants to see in a candidate.

“So I’ve never been a Trump voter,” he said.

Still, he said, he can understand why some voters would choose to lean toward the former President, and that he doesn’t “indict those who do.” He also said he hopes the voting public can move away from disagreeing with a person just because of who they picked for the presidency.

“I’ve been trying to reject that divisiveness in this campaign, but we live in a really divided time and that Trump question is part of the division,” he said.

His opponent in the election, he said, has spent too much of her time fighting against people like Trump, and billionaires like Elon Musk, and not enough time fighting for the people she represents. According to Deaton, he’s one of the only people on the planet that can get a right-wing billionaire like Musk to agree with a left-wing Harris campaign surrogate like Mark Cuban.

Warren, Deaton said, should be focused on expanding the middle class, not just aiming to take down the very rich.

A spokesperson for Warren said that’s precisely what she’s been doing for the last 12 years, and that now is not the time to take a gamble on Deaton.

“Elizabeth Warren has a strong record of delivering for Massachusetts and lowering costs for families. With so much at stake in this election — abortion ban nationwide, the Supreme Court, cuts to Medicare and Social Security, tax breaks for billionaires — just one vote and just one senator could put Republicans in charge of the Senate,” the spokesperson said.