Democrat Brian Schatz easily won Hawaii’s U.S. Senate race, holding on to the seat he was appointed to after the 2012 death of longtime Sen. Daniel Inouye.

Schatz was widely favored to win in heavily Democratic Hawaii against Republican Cam Cavasso in a special election to finish the two remaining years of Inouye’s six-year term. Polls ahead of Election Day showed Schatz ahead by a wide margin.

"I’m honored for the opportunity to continue to serve Hawaii in the Senate," Schatz said at about 8:15 p.m. "I’m anxious to get back to work." 

Schatz said the message on a national level is that "people are really sick of the gridlock. They really want us to work together on a bipartisan basis."

"I’m hopeful that we can find common ground in the appropriations process that has traditionally been a place where Democrats and Republicans can work together — but that has fallen apart over the last four to five years," Schatz said.

Schatz added that "we’re going to work hard on appropriations that will help Hawaii."  

In early voting returns, Schatz had a 69 percent to 24 percent lead over Cavasso, a former state lawmaker who is anti-abortion and a free-market conservative. The Associated Press projected a Schatz victory before all the polls closed.

Cavasso said he conceded at about 7:30 p.m. Schatz had 246,359 votes and Cavasso, 97,849 at 11:30 p.m. 

Schatz, 42, was appointed by Gov. Neil Abercrombie to replace the powerful Ino-uye, who was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee before his death on Dec. 17, 2012.

Schatz will return to a Senate that will be in Republican control and an environment in which sequestration and other budget cuts could make further dents in the military spending upon which Hawaii relies.

Colin Moore, a political science assistant professor at the University of Hawaii, said Schatz will be able to savor the slim primary win over U.S. Rep. Colleen Hana-busa and a general election win over Cavasso — but only briefly — before having to focus on a run for a full six-year term in a relatively short time.

Schatz positioned himself as "someone who plays well with the Senate Demo-crats and has worked on, I think, more progressive lefty issues like the environment," which Hawaii’s senators didn’t pay a lot of attention to before, he said.

"Now he’ll have the benefit of being an incumbent," Moore said, adding that the "Ino-uye deathbed story will no longer haunt him."

Inouye had asked Abercrombie to name Hana-busa to his seat as his "last wish" before dying at age 88 of respiratory complications.

Schatz said he’s "been effective in getting things done for Hawaii." As the chairman of two subcommittees, Schatz said he’s worked on creating local jobs as tourism chairman and pushed clean energy as water and power chairman.

Cavasso, 64, supported a Hawaii exemption from the Jones Act, the federal maritime law that protects the domestic shipping industry from foreign competitors, but which some have said drives up shipping costs.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report