Old and On the Way: How Ed Markey Dispatched Seth Moulton in Massachusetts
Moulton, a centrist opportunist, sought to unseat his incumbent opponent by posturing as a young progressive. Voters didn’t fall for it.
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton was the last 2020 Democratic presidential candidate to speak at the Iowa State Fair “political soapbox” in August 2019, and I got to see him there. He delivered a lackluster speech before a relatively small audience. Hilariously, he told the crowd that “I had people talking to me at the urinal in the restroom, saying that they’re here to hear my speech.” My friends and I joked that we could feel the “Moultmentum.”
To no one’s surprise, Moulton left the primary race six days later—months before any votes were cast. In 2018, he had been a leader in a small centrist Democratic movement to block Nancy Pelosi from becoming speaker if Democrats took the House back in the midterms. After the party did, that Moulton campaign also went nowhere.
Moulton’s 2026 primary challenge to Democratic Senator Ed Markey met the same fate Tuesday night, when the progressive incumbent beat him by nearly a two-to-one margin. The Boston centrist, 47, tried to make the race a generational challenge against the 80-year-old Markey. But in fact, Moulton locked himself into the role of the old and out-of-touch guy, when two days after Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump in 2024, he unburdened himself to The New York Times and announced that he disagreed with Harris and many Democrats’ progressive views, including staunch support for trans rights. “I have two little girls,” he said. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” Markey quickly denounced him for throwing trans Americans “under the bus,” but Moulton insisted he was only speaking hard truths to a complacent progressive establishment. “I think that our refusal to engage in this debate, to answer the Republicans’ attacks, did a great disservice to the trans community,” he said.
These efforts to play to anti-trans sentiment within the Democratic party fell flat in Moulton’s Senate bid. At an October “No Kings” rally in Boston, Markey drew cheers, wearing a sheer trans scarf in pink and light blue, while Moulton was booed. As his trans-baiting ploys failed to gain any traction in his Senate bid, Moulton apologized to anyone who was hurt by his remarks and said he broadly supported trans rights. Still, he never took back his slam on trans athletes’ playing in women’s sports.
That wasn’t the only reason Markey won, but it was one of them. The larger reason Moulton lost is that he is a career centrist opportunist who kicked Harris while she was down, tried to take the gavel from Pelosi, and consistently blamed the party’s left for Trump’s two victories. Challenging Markey, he also tried to revive the broadly shared Democratic discomfort, especially in hindsight, with Biden running for reelection at 80, when he was clearly hobbled in speech and physical movement by his age (and diagnosed with late-stage prostate cancer once he left office.)
Sadly for Biden, there’s no comparison with Markey, who is well-spoken, witty, and agile. The incumbent senator also put together strong support from progressives, including fellow Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Presley and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all of whom joined him for a late rally on Sunday. Years ago, he backed Ocasio-Cortez when the Green New Deal was considered radical (it later drove some Biden policies), and he also backs Medicare for All, expanding Social Security, and higher taxes on the wealthy.
“This is the greatest gathering of progressive voices on one stage,” Markey told the crowd on Sunday. “Our progressive-palooza. That’s what we have put together.” But the real excitement came with Tuesday’s vote-a-palooza, when he won back his seat 65–35.
Moulton drew progressive ire for linking Markey to the late sex-abuser Jeffrey Epstein, charging him with “meeting with a lobbyist on behalf of…Epstein.” Markey angrily denied the charge, which was eventually disproven. Another supposed point Moulton scored in a debate with Markey—a gotcha exchange that had Markey confessing that he wasn’t sure he’d ever used artificial intelligence—also turned out to be a nonissue. “I use whatever is inside of my iPhone and my iPad, whatever comes up,” the senator said. “And I don’t know what company my iPad might be using.” It was an honest and fair answer: none of us truly know what kind of software our devices employ. But the absolutely correct answer would have been that the Big Tech companies are putting so much AI slop in their devices and apps, it leaves users adopting AI whether they want to or not.
Despite Moulton’s slaps at Pelosi and Harris, in this race he wanted to be known as a progressive. His campaign website features a “redbox”—a ploy that campaigns use to skirt campaign rules against coordinating with outside groups by placing approved messaging for other advertising initiatives or social media promotions to adopt within a notionally unaffiliated red frame on their websites. Moulton’’s redbox said that “Voters under 40 on the go need to see that Ed Markey willfully doesn’t understand AI and is clinging to power while AI companies go unregulated, destroying our planet, our jobs and our mental health…. [They] need to see that Seth Moulton is a next generation progressive fighter who supports abolishing ICE, taxing the rich and health care for all.”
If that sort of appeal comes off as desperate opportunism, that’s because it is. Just last year, Moulton told The Boston Globe that progressive populism is “great for Democrats if we want to continue losing.” Jonathan Cohn, policy director of Progressive Mass, denounced Moulton’s 2026 moves. “Seth has done a fascinating job of trying to rebrand himself as progressive this cycle,” Cohn told The Lever. “[Moulton] doesn’t ever really actually hit on the big problem over the past few decades of the Democratic Party’s movement away from thinking about how the government can positively intervene to improve people’s everyday lives.”
Markey’s victory surprised some people, but I wasn’t one of them. I have never considered Moulton any kind of progressive, and I remember when Markey beat former representative Joseph P. Kennedy III, scion of Massachusetts’s most powerful political dynasty. No member of the Kennedy clan had ever lost a race there before. In November, Markey faces Republican John Deaton, who in 2024 lost badly to Elizabeth Warren.
