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MERRIMAC, Mass. – Rep. Seth Moulton, 47, finds plenty of ways to say it: Sen. Ed Markey, his Democratic primary opponent, is old.
He has a respectful version: “There just comes a time to pass the torch.”
And a direct version: “I just don’t believe Sen. Markey should be running for another six-year term at 80 years old.”
At campaign stops in community town halls to backyard fundraiser barbecues, Moulton is dragging the Democratic Party’s quiet family conversation about age into the light of day, arguing to voters that the stakes of the race are bigger than ideology and speak to the future of the party itself.
“Why does this race matter, beyond Boston or Newburyport?” Moulton asked a crowd of about 200 at Newburyport’s City Hall. “Because it’s a referendum on the future of the Democratic Party. In fact, it’s the last Senate primary before the November midterms. So people are either going to look at the Democratic Party and say: Oh, there they go again, reelecting the same establishment gerontocracy that we just voted against two years ago; or they’re going to say, no, it looks like the Democratic Party is changing. It’s listening.”
Markey isn’t alone. Elderly incumbents across the country who’ve won endorsements from colleagues, labor unions, and progressive organizations are not scaring challengers away. Instead, they’re drawing them – in the form of younger Democrats willing to say the uncomfortable part out loud to voters, whose harsh memories of Joe Biden dooming their 2024 campaign – and of four Democrats dying in their House seats since that election – are still fresh
In Connecticut, former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, 46, won the local party’s endorsement at a Monday convention, over 77-year-old incumbent Rep. John Larson, who suffered a “complex partial seizure” that caused him to freeze during a 2025 floor speech.
“There’s a reason that so many Americans are starting to support age limits, because it’s just good and healthy to get renewal every once in a while to get some new voices and new perspectives,” Bronin told Semafor. “I’m running because he’s been in elected office for almost half a century, and in Congress for almost 30 years, and he’s part of a Democratic establishment that keeps doing the same thing despite the fact that the world has changed.”
Moulton and Bronin are both military veterans in their 40s, like Maine’s Graham Platner, who effectively secured the nomination for U.S. Senate in his state after 78-year-old Gov. Janet Mills dropped out. To the frustration of Democrats who recruited her, Mills could not overcome Democratic angst about her age, even after she pledged to serve only one term.
Moulton and Bronin are seeing some of the same angst in their parts of New England – a non-ideological worry that their party has too many senior citizens in power, and that they should have retired after Donald Trump’s comeback.
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Moulton is confident that he’ll get enough delegate votes at this month’s convention to make the primary ballot. Last week an Emerson Poll put Markey at 37% and Moulton at 32% among primary voters, with Markey winning Democrats and Moulton winning the “unenrolled” independents who can pull a Democratic ballot. Markey’s team disputed those numbers.
Markey, who turns 80 in July, waged a remarkable 2020 campaign that recast him as a progressive hero and dealt the Kennedy family its first real electoral defeat in Massachusetts.
Moulton did not strike Democrats as a Kennedy-level challenger. He ran quixotically for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and after Kamala Harris’s defeat, he drew protests after criticizing the party’s position on trans participation in girls sports.
“I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” he told the New York Times. Three days after Moulton announced his Senate bid, Markey spoke at the October No Kings march in Boston with a pink, white, and blue transgender flag draped over his shoulders.
Moulton has said since that he does not support categorical bans on transgender athletes’ participation in girls sports. In a recent interview with Semafor he emphasized his support for the “Transgender Bill of Rights,” a House bill co-authored by Markey that extends protections under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to gender identity, and codifies non-discrimination in housing, credit, education and employment. He said that he wanted his party to come up with a positive rights agenda, recalling a father of a trans child who thanked him for “actually having the courage to take on these issues” when other Democrats repeated talking points.
Progressive endorsers stuck with Markey, but Moulton has found considerable interest in his generational change message – more than in 2020, when Democratic voters were nominating Joe Biden for president and hoping that Ruth Bader Ginsburg could-out last the Trump administration.
Markey is running a less aggressive race than he did six years ago. As of April 1, he had raised less than $3.7 million for re-election, with $2.5 million on hand; he had $4 million on hand at the same point in 2020. Moulton had raised $4.1 million, with $3.3 million on hand.
That’s a smaller cash advantage than Joe Kennedy III built in his Markey challenge, but the senator has not found another re-election argument as crisp as his last one. In 2020, he touted his co-authorship of the Green New Deal and his alliance with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They have not re-introduced a version of the environmental package, and Ocasio-Cortez, an early endorser in 2020, has stayed neutral. The Trump administration’s gutting of the climate funding Markey did get from Biden has deprived him of an accomplishment to run on.
The lower-key campaign was on display last week in Gloucester, when both men addressed local Democrats. Moulton arrived early, shaking hands at every table, and delivered a short speech.
Markey waited outside the venue until his time to speak. The crowd’s biggest applause came when he said he was “number one in voting against more of Donald Trump’s nominees than any other member” and that he was “the first United States senator to call for the abolition of ICE.” He described his “AI Civil Rights Act” that would enforce “protections against discrimination against women, against minorities, the LGBTQ community.”
“That was the first time I’d heard of it,” Moulton told Semafor. After posing with local high school scholarship winners, Markey headed out.
The View From Voters
Elizabeth Gorman, who came to see Moulton in Newburyport, said that she was leaning his way despite appreciating the work both he and Markey did.
“I don’t have anything negative to say about Sen. Markey,” said Gorman, 68. “I think he’s a good person, but he has been in Washington for a long time. And I do think we’re seeing, especially in the Democratic Party, that people who have been around for a very long time – they just don’t have fresh ideas. They tend to fall back on the old ways of doing things.”
Santiago Mayer, the founder of the youth Democratic group Voters of Tomorrow, said that it had endorsed Markey right away – two Massachusetts chapters were helping him – because Markey had a better record on their issues.
“Representing young people means more than being young yourself,” said Mayer. “We have seen our communities terrorized by ICE, we’ve seen attacks on young transgender people, and he has been there with us.”
David’s view
How many wake-up calls do Democrats need? Platner’s humiliation of Janet Mills, who pulled out before a state party convention where she would have had real trouble, would not have played out the same way if she was 10 years younger. It made sense, on paper, for Senate Democrats to talk Mills into the race. But her age and her pledge to seek one term stirred Democrats’ PTSD from 2024, when they convinced themselves that voters were wrong, and Biden could win again.
Mills didn’t have Biden’s senior moments or a Larson-esque on-camera freeze. The trouble is that Democrats were inclined to forgive that before, and not now. They’ve lost decades of progressive legislative wins, in part, because Biden ran again and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire when Democrats could have replaced her. Six years ago, when I interviewed Markey about his race, I asked what Democrats would do if Ginsburg died before the election; his answer was something about “fighting,” which of course didn’t work.
Even Democrats like Moulton who are talking about age, don’t lead with it, but they don’t need to. Voters, I find, are thinking it over. “It’s going to be very important that elected Democrats show that our agenda is not just returning to some prior normal, or some old status quo,” Pete Buttigieg said when I asked him why he endorsed Bronin, which set him apart from other Democrats arguing that Larson deserved a 15th term.