Incumbent Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) is handily leading Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) in a primary race for his seat in the upper chamber, according to a new poll. In the Emerson College Polling survey released Sunday, 60.4 percent of…
Page A7From§Eachthe late evening edition — 30 August 2026
Moulton calls 80-year-old Markey too old to serve; voters hand Moulton the defeat instead.
As it ran on the front
Ed Markey is eighty years old, and Seth Moulton spent the closing days of a Senate primary telling anybody who'd listen that eighty is too old for the job. That's a fair argument to make in a democracy. Make it, put it on a mailer, let the voters chew on it.
They chewed on it. Then they handed the win to the eighty-year-old, by a landslide, according to the same poll that reported the age attack in the first place. That's not an accident of timing, that's the electorate looking at the guy calling somebody else washed up and deciding they'd rather have the somebody else.…
…(cont) Here's the con, if you want to call it that: 'too old' is never really about the candle count. It's a stand-in for 'not answering my calls the way I'd like,' or 'not my turn yet,' or sometimes just 'I don't have anything else.' Moulton didn't run against Markey's record. He ran against Markey's birth certificate. And the voters -- the same voters who are supposedly desperate for fresh blood, who tell every pollster in America they want generational change -- looked at that pitch and trounced it.
This is the part that should worry the consultants more than it will: the age attack is the easiest attack in politics to make and apparently one of the least effective when it's the whole campaign. It requires no policy, no record, no vision, just a number and a raised eyebrow. Voters can tell the difference between 'this person is too old to do the job' and 'this person is too old and I don't have anything else to say,' and in Massachusetts, this month, they told the difference with a landslide.
The guy at the end of the bar doesn't care how old his senator is. He cares whether the senator answers the phone when the rent's due. Markey's eighty. He also just got trounced in his own favor. Sit with that the next time somebody tells you the fix is generational.
“Moulton spent the campaign saying eighty's too old for the job, and the voters looked at that argument and buried it under a landslide for the eighty-year-old. Sometimes the best answer to 'he's washed up' is just a better number.”
“Age is a legitimate issue voters are entitled to weigh, and Congressman Moulton simply raised it -- the poll numbers reflect where the primary stands today, not a referendum on the argument itself, and it's not like the campaign is over, well, it -- actually the poll's pretty decisive.”
The receipts
The Massachusetts Democrat's answer to a debate question was striking.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.