Sen. Ed Markey, 80, is set to face 47-year-old Rep. Seth Moulton in Massachusetts on Tuesday in a Democratic primary for Senate set to be marked by discussions of age and generational change.
Page A5From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 2 September 2026
Primary billed as referendum on generational change; 80-year-old incumbent wins easily anyway.
As it ran on the front
Every cycle somebody in a blazer stands at a podium and tells you this is the year, the generational one, the one where the furniture finally gets rearranged. This cycle it was Massachusetts, and the furniture in question was a Senate seat currently occupied by a man who was already a sitting member of Congress when the Watergate tapes were still warm. The challenger ran on being forty-seven. He lost to a man built different — built in 1946.
Here's the part nobody at the debate stage says out loud: 'generational change' is not a policy, it's a marketing category, the same shelf as 'new and improved' on a box of the same soap. It tells you nothing about what changes and everything about what doesn't. What didn't change in Massachusetts is the same thing that never changes in an incumbency fight — name recognition built over five decades, a donor list with muscle memory, and a state party apparatus that had picked its guy in every meaningful way before a single voter picked up a pen.…
…(cont) And here's the receipt that makes it sting: seventy percent of the young people in this country, polled the same week, said they are not proud of where the nation is heading. Not scared, not undecided — not proud. That's the demographic the generational-change argument was supposedly built for, and that's the demographic that watched the argument lose by a landslide to a man who's been in federal office since before their parents could vote.
I'm not telling you Ed Markey is a bad senator. I'm telling you the fight was never actually about age. It was about whether the machinery that decides who's allowed to run competitively in a one-party state can be beaten by a press release about generational change, and the machinery answered that question the way it always does — comfortably, on the first try, without breaking a sweat. The 47-year-old lost. The 80-year-old's fine. The 70 percent still isn't proud. Write that down, because it's going to be on the test again in two years, with a different name on the ballot and the same result waiting at the bottom.
“They called it a fight over 'generational change,' then the guy from 1946 walked away with it standing up. Seventy percent of the kids in that state can't tell you the country's headed anywhere good, and the ballot they got to fix it had one name on it that's been on ballots since Nixon. That's not democracy stalling, that's the machine running exactly as designed.”
“Look, seniority is a feature, not a bug — Markey's committee seats took decades to build, and you don't walk away from that kind of institutional memory. Did I just call incumbency a feature? That... actually is the exact complaint people have with it. Seniority just means you got there first and never left, that's all I'm saying.”
The receipts
A majority of young Americans don’t have pride in the direction of their country, a newly released poll suggests. In a survey conducted by American University's Sine Institute of Policy & Politics and published Tuesday, 70 percent of respondents — aged 18 to 34 — said they weren't proud of “where America is heading as...
Sen. Ed Markey has fended off a challenge from Rep. Seth Moulton in the Massachusetts Democratic primary for Senate, Decision Desk HQ projects.
Democratic Sen. Ed Markey defeated Rep. Seth Moulton in the Senate primary in Massachusetts, NBC News projects, in a victory for the party’s progressive wing.
Bucking a push for younger leadership this election season, Sen. Ed Markey, 80, won the Democratic nomination against Rep. Seth Moulton, 47, who said that his party needed new leaders.
The race centered on whether Markey, 80, was too old to serve a third term in the Senate. The longtime liberal stalwart will be 86 by the end of his next term.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.