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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........

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