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Seth Moulton Saw Trans Rights as a Political Liability. It Could Doom His Senate Campaign.

The Massachusetts congressman is struggling to land his message of generational change with his past anti-trans comments haunting him.

Days after Donald Trump won his second election to the White House, Democrats flocked to the New York Times to blame their stunning electoral defeat on alleged capitulations to minority groups — and cement themselves as the future leaders of the party. 

Few appeared more eager than Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., a moderate congressman and former presidential candidate with a reputation for bucking party leadership. 

“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone,” Moulton lamented to the paper. “I have two little girls, 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.” 

That was over a year ago. Now, Moulton is running to unseat one of the most progressive members of the Senate, in the bluest state in the country, on a platform of generational change. And the anti-trans comments he’d hoped would establish him as a thought leader could help tank his campaign. 

Polls consistently show Moulton trailing his opponent, incumbent Sen. Ed Markey, particularly among younger voters. Despite making a case for a new generation in office, Moulton has a 3 percent favorability rating among likely voters ages 18 to 34, compared to Markey’s 67 percent, according to a February 24 poll from the University of New Hampshire. Only 2 percent of likely Massachusetts primary voters under 34 said they would vote for Moulton if the race were held that day, while 53 percent said they would support Markey.

Though it’s still early — most Massachusetts voters won’t cast their ballots until September 1 — the state of the race suggests that Moulton, while attempting to style himself as the vanguard of a brash new Democratic party, picked up some serious political baggage.

Tatishe M. Nteta, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said Moulton was far from alone in his post-mortem for Kamala Harris. “The problem is, those comments now have defined [Moulton], not just as a national figure who bucked Democratic viewpoints, but now within the state,” he said. “In order for him to win, he’s going to either have to walk it back or justify it.” 

There were warning signs at the time. Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey said the Salem congressman was “playing politics with people,” but Moulton refused to apologize. He argued that the backlash only reinforced his point and accused Democrats of forcing people to “change our values” to meet “the demands of one very small minority group,” by doing things like making them “put pronouns in their email signatures.”

“His ideas are from the last generation.”

“His ideas are from the last generation.”

“We were extremely offended by the comments that Seth Moulton made,” David Seaton, a college student at Tufts University and vice president of political affairs for the College Democrats of America, told The Intercept. “While Seth Moulton is running on a platform of generational change, his ideas are from the last generation, and his values are certainly from generations past.”

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Moulton is now stuck in a political quagmire trapping other Democratic pundits and politicians, some with presidential designs, who tripped over themselves to blame Harris’s loss on the party becoming too woke and out of touch. But now, as voters seem more concerned with rising costs, mounting war, and waning access to health care than pronoun usage, those comments seem less like a prediction and more like a political liability. 

“When you look at how much the world has changed since that moment,”........

© The Intercept