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.
Page A7From§Eachthe milkman edition — 2 September 2026
Massachusetts primary billed as generational change; the 80-year-old wins it again.
As it ran on the front
I've been hearing about generational change since before some of these candidates could vote. Every cycle somebody's kid shows up with a jawline and a donor list and tells you the old guy's finally done, and every cycle the old guy cashes the check anyway. This time the old guy is eighty. His opponent was forty-seven, well-funded enough to make noise, and the entire race, by CBS's own accounting, revolved around exactly one question: does age disqualify you from representing Massachusetts. The voters answered. It doesn't.
Here's the part that should bother you more than his birth certificate. The same outlets that spent years telling you an aging president couldn't be trusted with the job suddenly discovered 'a rare win for the old guard' worth applauding when it's a senator who leaned into a culture-war fight they wanted kept alive. The Daily Caller isn't confused about arithmetic. It knows exactly how old eighty is. It just likes this particular eighty-year-old's opponent even less, because a moderate willing to compromise is scarier to that machine than an incumbent everybody already knows how to caricature.…
…(cont) That's the trick with 'generational change.' It was never a promise to hand you a different set of donors, a different committee assignment structure, a different set of PACs writing checks the week after the primary. It's a costume. The name on the yard sign gets younger or it doesn't; the seniority system, the committee chairs, the campaign finance apparatus that decides who gets to run competitively in the first place — none of that turns over on primary night. Younger challenger, older incumbent, same building in Washington cashing the same rent.
So when the ballot says 'generational change' and the returns say business as usual, don't read it as a contradiction. Read it as the honest answer to a question nobody in either party actually wanted asked out loud: whether the age of the person matters more than the interests they're already contracted to serve. It doesn't. Eighty or forty-seven, the mortgage on your kid's future gets serviced by whoever's already in the building, and the building didn't just get an entrance exam. It renewed its lease.
“They sell you 'generational change' like it's a new product line, then hand you the same guy with a new slogan. Eighty is a scandal when it's the other party's guy, wisdom when it's this one. Either way, the seniority ladder and the donor list stay exactly where they were before anybody voted.”
“Look, voters chose experience over inexperience — that's just good governance, plain and simple. And sure, we spent years saying a certain octogenarian couldn't find the exit off a stage, but Markey's a different — okay, that's not the point I meant to make. Let's just say seniority matters when it's convenient.”
The receipts
Markey’s win is a rare victory for the old guard
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.
Ed Markey defeated Seth Moulton's generational change campaign by leaning into progressive credentials and taking a bold stance on transgender rights in sports.
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.