Senator Ed Markey won the Democratic primary in Massachusetts on Tuesday, beating back a challenge from Seth Moulton, a congressman who tried to unseat him by arguing to voters his opponent was too old to be effective at his job.
Massachusetts is heavily Democratic, making the senator favored to win a third full term in the November general election, where he faces the Republican nominee John Deaton.
The 80-year-old incumbent, according to the Associated Press, easily defeated his 47-year-old rival, at a moment when Democratic voters agonize over the age of some lawmakers, a concern that was amplified by Joe Biden’s disastrous re-election bid in 2024, and Kamala Harris’s subsequent failure to keep Donald Trump from returning to the White House.
In primaries elsewhere in the country this year, Democratic voters unseated a handful of long-serving incumbents in favor of younger, progressive challengers who vowed to break from the party orthodoxy on issues like support for Israel.
But the dynamics in Massachusetts were somewhat of a reversal, with Markey being a longtime advocate for progressive causes and Moulton, who was born after Markey was first elected to the House in 1976, staking out more moderate positions on certain issues.
The senator is a champion of proposals to create a universal single-payer healthcare system and enact sweeping clean energy policies known as the “Green New Deal”, and had the backing of top congressional progressives, including Vermont independent senator Bernie Sanders and Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, also of Massachusetts.
Moulton, who first won election to a north-eastern Massachusetts district in 2014, has not endorsed single payer healthcare proposals, and shortly before Tuesday’s primary election apologized for saying that he did not want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete” – comments made after Trump beat Harris in the 2024 election in part by vowing to curb transgender rights.
The question of when a lawmaker is too old to continue serving loomed large when the candidates met for a debate in August. “I think everyone watching this debate can see that I’m more energized than I’ve ever been before in my life. I am crisscrossing the state. I’m fighting for families,” the senator said.
Moulton said his opponent had spent less time holding town halls and candidate forums, and pounced when the senator replied to a question about what AI tools he used by answering “whatever is inside of my iPhone and my iPad – whatever comes up”.
“Senator, if you don’t even know what you’re using on your phone or your iPad, this is why we need a new generation of leaders to regulate these technologies to make sure that they are safe,” Moulton said.
In the days before the primary, polls showed Markey with a sizable lead over Moulton. In 2020, the senator had fended off a challenge from congressman Joe Kennedy III, a member of the state’s best-known political dynasty.
