The Media Are Paying Attention to the Wrong Massachusetts Dem Primary

The contest between Tram Nguyen and Dan Koh in the 6th congressional district shows that the real divide isn’t between progressives and moderates. Instead, it’s between the “resistance” and affordability platforms.

You’re reading The TNR Blue Book. Get daily scoops, strategy, and developments inside the liberal ideas factory delivered right to your inbox. Sign up for free.

The media are paying attention to the wrong Massachusetts Dem primary

As Massachusetts voters head to the polls for the primary election on Tuesday, the race between incumbent Senator Ed Markey and his younger, more moderate challenger Representative Seth Moulton continues to receive the most attention, even though 80-year-old Markey is nearly certain to win. The race to replace Moulton in the 6th congressional district, on the other hand, is wide open, serving as a microcosm of some of the issues troubling Democrats across the country.

The two front-runners in the five-candidate MA-6 race are Tram Nguyen and Dan Koh. John Beccia, who is self-funding his campaign, could have a chance but appears to be decidedly behind the former two candidates.

In some ways, the race seems a classic matchup between an insurgent progressive and an establishment moderate. Nguyen “is the more progressive, the more grassroots, the more walking the streets, knocking on doors” candidate, said Erin O’Brien, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “That’s the easy frame to understand her.” Meanwhile, Koh is “a good Democrat,” she said, “more or less a moderate, lots of D.C. connections.”

But perhaps more importantly, the MA-6 race showcases the nationwide split between anti-Trump resistance Democrats (like Koh) and affordability-focused candidates (like Nguyen) who want to create a message that moves beyond Trump. That divide has already played out this primary season, notably in Alex Vindman’s loss to state Representative Angie Nixon in the Florida Senate primary. Vindman gained a national profile for his testimony during the 2019 Trump impeachment inquiry, and made this a focus of his campaign. Other impeachment leaders, like Representatives Diana DeGette and Dan Goldman, lost their races to progressive challengers.

Koh, who served as deputy assistant to former President Joe Biden and deputy director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, has earned the endorsement of both Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris. Nguyen has been a state representative since 2019 and has earned endorsements from state progressives like Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Lori Trahan, as well as state House Speaker Ronald Mariano and state Speaker Pro Tempore Kate Hogan. Her endorsements aren’t just the typical progressive names, which could give her an edge.

“There aren’t necessarily a ton of places in America where people are breaking out the Biden name-drop,” said David Hopkins, a professor of political science at Boston College. But given the more moderate makeup of the 6th district, Koh’s “calculation” to emphasize the Biden connection “may be a correct one,” Hopkins added.

The district includes the northern suburbs of Boston, and is rated D 11 by the Cook Partisan Voter Index. It’s clearly a Democrat-dominated district, and the winner of today’s election is expected to win the general election against Republican Micah Jones. But the district is a far cry from the progressive urban strongholds of Boston and Cambridge. It’s an older, suburban, more middle-income district, which elected the decidedly moderate Moulton six times.

Koh’s strategy seems to be, “I want to be the champion of normie Democrats who still think Joe Biden did a good job and still think Trump is the enemy,” said Hopkins. That strategy is evident as soon as you open Koh’s campaign website, which centers the slogan: “Fight Trump. Lower Costs.” The first three issues on his issues page are Fighting Trump’s Corruption, Protecting Democracy, and Abolish Trump’s ICE. Meanwhile, none of the policy points on Nguyen’s website mention Trump, and she focuses instead on economic justice issues.

At the end of the day, noted Ray La Raja, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the two candidates would likely support the same legislation in Congress on most issues. “She’s trying to run in the lane to the left because she thinks that’s where the energy is,” he said. “He interprets this race as people looking for a fighter.”

The National Park Service confirmed a second death on Monday in the Grand Canyon flash flood in Arizona that occurred over the weekend. As of Tuesday morning, one person remains missing, with some 80 people rescued in the past few days. The Park Service has said there is “no estimated reopening date” for the affected areas. The Washington Post’s Ben Knoll reports that while this is part of the expected monsoon season in Arizona, “a record-breaking El Niño and a marine heat wave in the Pacific Ocean have combined to load the atmosphere with moisture.… On the backdrop of climate change, these factors have driven atmospheric moisture levels 5 to 15 percent higher than average.” Meanwhile, the death toll from flash floods in Nepal and Tibet following a glacier collapse has climbed to over a thousand. Faced with billions of dollars of repairs, Nepal has reportedly appealed to the United Nations’ climate-disaster recovery fund for help.

The Ohio Capital Journal warns that after nearly a third of Affordable Care Act enrollees in the state dropped their marketplace plans following the GOP’s decision to let subsidies expire, the “smaller, sicker clientele” that remains will see their premiums rise an average of 14.7 percent for 2027. Ohio saw the “biggest enrollment drop of any state” following the subsidy expiration. Democrats are hoping to flip the governor’s mansion, a U.S. Senate seat, three U.S. House seats, and at least six Statehouse seats in Ohio.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

“Stop Doomscrolling. Do Something,” Democracy Forward president Skye Perryman urges New York Times readers. “Many of us confuse consuming political news, engaging on social media and participating in group chats with doing the things that we, as individuals, can do to help change our country’s trajectory,” Perryman writes in the paper’s opinion section. But twentieth-century political history, she argues, shows that “ordinary Americans” were the ones who pushed through major reforms. “We can organize our neighbors, work at local polling places or join community groups. We must not be satisfied with watching the decline of American democracy from our phones.”

In case you missed it: Public Citizen condemned the Trump administration’s announcement late last week that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would be reversing an Obama-era rule establishing fuel efficiency standards for medium and heavy-duty truck engines. “This latest attempted rollback by Trump is yet another giveaway to the oil and gas industry, the effects of which will increase fuel costs for truckers and in turn, raise the cost of consumer goods,” said Public Citizen electric vehicle policy advocate Will Anderson in the organization’s statement.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

Political Trivia Question of the Day

What two presidents (1) ordered the construction of the East and West Wings of the White House and (2) ordered and oversaw the East Wing’s significant expansion? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

Texas Dems’ Leader Pulls No Punches: Abbott, Paxton Are “Full of Sh--”

Kendall Scudder, the chair of the Texas Democratic Party, tells TNR why he’s optimistic about the November midterm elections.

You’re reading The TNR Blue Book. Get daily scoops, strategy, and developments inside the liberal ideas factory delivered right to your inbox. Sign up for free.

Kendall Scudder has his work cut out for him. He became chair of the Texas Democratic Party in March 2025, inheriting a party in debt that just five months later had to contend with state Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting, which aimed to net the party five more House seats in the 2026 midterms. He has also had to navigate a contentious Senate primary between U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett and State Representative James Talarico, which the latter won. 

In addition to those headaches, Scudder created one of his own by restructuring the party’s operations. Rather than being centralized in Austin, staff are now distributed across Austin, Dallas, Houston, Eagle Pass, and Amarillo. Some staff quit as a result. But the shake-up apparently was popular with the party’s delegates, who overwhelmingly reelected Scudder as chair in June.

We spoke Thursday about the state of the Texas Democratic Party today and what the future—near and far—holds.

Is it mostly rural areas where you’re trying to expand the map? Are you focusing on suburbs? What does that expansion look like?

What a lot of people from outside of Texas don’t quite realize is, yes, we are geographically very large. We have some of the largest cities in America, many of them here in Texas. They are mega-metros, and so what that means is that you end up with what we consider midsize cities that, in other states, are considered their population centers. Lubbock, Texas, has more people in it than Richmond, Virginia. If I have to prioritize out, [I would focus] on those midsize city population centers that often have never been worked, may not have even had county chairs, precinct chairs, and [would start] to build the party out. So we have to walk and chew gum in a state like Texas. 

When I became chairman, we were up to our eyeballs in debt. Only a third of our precinct chairs were full. About 20 percent of our county chair spots were vacant. We left 27 seats uncontested on the last ballot, and the last coordinated campaign was only $2 million. And if you flash-forward 18 months, we’re a debt-free party that has a $30 million coordinated campaign. We’ve recruited and trained more than 1,000 precinct chairs. We’ve recruited Democrats in every state and federal office.

You are trying to build something that’s going to last beyond this year. Do you have a timeline in your head?

You can’t flip a state the size of Texas overnight. But I think that the deadlines are set for us. Redistricting comes in 2030. We all know the population allocation that’s happening after that—Texas is going to gain a bunch of members of Congress. A lot of blue states are losing some members of Congress. If Texas is not competitive and in play by 2032 for a presidential election, then you won’t have a Democratic president. It’s that simple.

I want to talk about the Senate race. Beto O’Rourke came really close in 2018, but he didn’t ultimately win. What does Talarico have to get over that last little hump that Beto didn’t?

Beto had to do it all on his own. Not to harp on how important a state party is, but Beto didn’t have one, really. He literally didn’t even operate on our voter file because he couldn’t trust the voter file. What Talarico has is an apparatus now that, while it is not perfect and it is certainly underfunded, it is one that sets reasonable expectations, meets them, understands its role, and builds a coordinated campaign and raises resources to accomplish that. 

The demographics are constantly shifting in this state. I think a lot of Hispanic Texans feel like they were lied to, because they were, and that is a real ticket to flipping Texas: the Mexican American vote, and no one has really been able to tap into that. 

Some people are still saying that Jasmine Crockett, even though she endorsed Talarico, hasn’t really put her full support behind him. Do you think she needs to get more enthusiastically behind him?

I’m not one to tell anybody what they need to do. What I will say is that it is the responsibility of James Talarico to earn every vote in this state that he can, and I think he’s up to the challenge to do........

© New Republic