State Sen. Heather Somers, a Groton Republican, won re-election to a third term Tuesday, with unofficial results showing she garnered nearly 2,500 more votes than her challenger, Democrat Bob Statchen of Stonington.

Somers' winning margin, reflecting numbers still being updated on the website of the Secretary of the State's office, is 1,000 votes less than reported earlier.

Statchen agreed that Somers had won the election in a phone interview with The Day around 11 p.m. Tuesday.

“I am incredibly honored and humbled by the confidence placed in me again by the voters of the 18th District and look forward to continuing to serve with an independent voice to deliver results for eastern Connecticut and challenge the broken status quo in Hartford,” Somers said in a statement issued late Tuesday night by her campaign manager, Jon Conradi.

The latest numbers show Somers garnered 26,375 votes to Statchen's 23,938 votes, a margin of 52.4% to 47.6%.

The outcome was similar to the candidates’ first meeting in 2018, when Somers gained 54.7% of the vote in a 3,600-vote victory in the district that stretches from Groton and Stonington on the southeastern Connecticut shoreline northward through North Stonington, Preston, Griswold and Voluntown in New London County and into Plainfield and Sterling in Windham County.

As he had in 2018, Statchen outpolled Somers in Groton and Stonington, the district's most populous towns, but lost in each of the district's six smaller and more rural towns. Groton and Stonington were the only district towns in which Joe Biden outpolled President Donald Trump in the presidential race. Somers ran especially strong in Griswold, Voluntown and Sterling.

Ninety minutes after polls closed at 8 p.m., Somers was huddled with members of her campaign staff at her Noank Road home in Mystic, while Statchen had visited Democratic headquarters in Groton and was to join a Zoom call with members of the Stonington Democratic Town Committee.

Voting in the district ebbed and flowed throughout the day, with both candidates visiting multiple polling places.

Before Tuesday, district voters had returned more than 16,000 absentee ballots, one of them Statchen’s.

Somers, on the other hand, voted in person at the S.B. Butler Elementary School in Groton’s Mystic section, arriving with her husband, Mark, shortly before 7:30 a.m. in a 1971 Chevrolet Chevelle convertible. Painted in stars on one side and stripes on the other and bearing the candidate’s “Senate 18” plates, the car originally belonged to Mark’s father.

Shannon McKenzie, a poll worker, said a long line already had formed outside the school when she arrived for duty at 5:15 a.m. By 7:30, the line had nearly disappeared.

Statchen, a Stonington Board of Finance member and an Air Force veteran, a colonel in the Connecticut Air National Guard and a law professor at Western New England University, sharply criticized Somers during the campaign, characterizing her as an “enabler” of President Donald Trump for failing to call him out over such national issues as his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, his response to the Black Lives Matter protests and his push to fill a U.S. Supreme Court vacancy.

“Heather Somers supported Trump in 2016 and has refused to condemn anything he has done or even say whether she still supports him,” Statchen’s campaign mailers read.

Somers all but ignored the attacks, and stressed her record of service to her constituents during her four years in the legislature. In 2014, she unsuccessfully ran for lieutenant governor on a GOP ticket headed by gubernatorial candidate Tom Foley.

“I don’t have to defend my values,” Somers said when she and Statchen debated Oct. 21 in New London. “I’m not running for federal office. I have to represent everyone in my district regardless of who they support for president.”

Before voting Tuesday, Somers acknowledged that many of her constituents are “disappointed and disillusioned” with what’s going on in Washington and that Connecticut’s legislature, controlled by a Democratic governor and Democratic majorities in both chambers, needs “balance.”

“We’re the third worst state when it comes to solvency,” she said. “We’re going to be facing a $7 billion deficit in 2022-23.”

A former Groton mayor and town councilor, Somers helped found a biotech company while working in the private sector. A ranking member of the legislature’s Public Health Committee, she has been named by Gov. Ned Lamont to the state’s COVID-19 Vaccine Advisory Group, which has been charged with developing a plan for the distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine when one becomes available.

b.hallenbeck@thedaycom