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 A8From§Eachthe milkman edition — 31 August 2026
Markey routs Senate rival in primary polling; coverage instead fixates on his stance on youth sports.
As it ran on the front
Ed Markey is beating Seth Moulton in the Massachusetts Senate primary by a margin big enough that 'trounces' is the actual word used in the polling story, not this columnist's editorializing, theirs. That's the ballgame. That's the story, if the story is who's going to be a senator. Instead, the same week, national coverage runs the race through the lens of Markey's position on youth sports policy — specifically, his defense of transgender athletes' eligibility to play — as if the primary is a referendum on a locker room instead of a landslide.
This is not an accident of editorial judgment. It is the oldest move in the coverage playbook: when the horse race isn't close enough to be a horse race, you find the wedge and cover the wedge instead, because a blowout doesn't get people to click and a fight about kids playing sports does. Nobody assigned that story because they thought Massachusetts voters were undecided on the merits of youth athletics policy in a primary Markey was already winning by a landslide. They assigned it because it travels.…
…(cont) Watch where the actual votes went and where the actual ink went, and you'll notice they don't point the same direction. The votes point at Markey, overwhelmingly. The ink points at a subject that has nothing to do with why he won and everything to do with what generates outrage clicks from people who were never going to vote in this primary anyway. That gap — between what decided the race and what got covered about the race — is not free. Somebody chose it, and the choosing is the story nobody wrote.
None of this says the sports policy question doesn't matter to the families it actually touches — it does, and it deserves better than being used as a distraction from a landslide primary. It says the wedge got promoted over the landslide because the wedge is more useful to somebody's ratings than the landslide ever was. The kids playing sports don't get a say in how their eligibility becomes a headline. The only people who benefit from that swap are the ones selling the swap.
In lieu of an honest scoreboard, the coverage offers a culture war rerun, and the actual election results run on page two.
“The man is winning by a landslide and the story somehow becomes a sports debate — that's not coverage drifting, that's coverage being aimed, because a blowout doesn't sell ads and a culture fight does.”
“This isn't about the polling gap at all, this is a legitimate question about his position on student athletics, which voters absolutely deserve to have front-paged over, say, the actual outcome of the race, and if that sounds like changing the subject, that's — yeah, okay, that's changing the subject.”
The receipts
Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts has emerged as a vocal defender of transgender rights as he tries to fend off a primary challenge from Representative Seth Moulton.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.