“I can't control what the president's going to say at the convention, but I can control where I'm at,” one battleground member said.
Page A7From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 2 September 2026
Republicans aren't flocking to Trump's midterm convention, yet their outlets found time for the Democratic primary.
As it ran on the front
Let's be clear about what happened this week, because some outlets are trying to make it sound like a problem. Republicans "aren't exactly flocking," in Politico's words, to the president's own midterm convention. That's not a story about enthusiasm. That's a story about scheduling. People have jobs. People have — actually, you know, a midterm convention for the sitting party's own leader typically draws a crowd specifically because it's the one event built to generate enthusiasm, so I suppose low attendance is a data point on enthusiasm, that's fair, strike what I said.
Meanwhile, and this is the important context nobody's providing: our reporters have been busy elsewhere, and rightly so. Four separate pieces this week on the Massachusetts Democratic primary — the establishment "flexing dominance" as insurgents fall, a streaming commentator cheerleading for progressives while an 80-year-old incumbent wins six more years, a progressive candidate hitting a wall against a conservative Democrat in a deep-blue district. That's not obsession. That's coverage of a genuinely newsworthy internal Democratic story, which we are absolutely capable of finding interesting on its own terms and not at all because it's easier to write about their party's cracks than to explain why our own convention is running under capacity. I want to be clear that's not why. It might be partly why.…
…(cont) Here's the actual argument, and I'll try to land it this time: a party doesn't need a packed convention floor to be strong; strength shows up in the win column, not the RSVP count. The fact that our bench is described in the same sentence as "thins" is a wire-service word choice, not a verdict — although I'll grant that when the word choice keeps showing up, verified independently, across multiple outlets, in multiple states, it starts to function less like an adjective and more like a finding. I didn't write that sentence. I'm not sure who did.
The bottom line, and I mean this now: covering the other guy's primary in detail while your own convention draws light traffic is not a contradiction, it's a strategic allocation of editorial resources toward the more competitive story of the two. Whether that's a compliment to their side or an admission about ours is a question I am specifically not going to finish answering.
“The party can't fill seats for its own leader's convention but somehow finds four separate segments to cover the other side's primary — that's not journalism, that's misdirection, look at what they're pointing at so you don't look at who's not showing up.”
“Look, low convention turnout doesn't mean anything, people are busy, the coverage of the Democratic primary is just good reporting on a competitive race — did I say competitive, it wasn't competitive, Markey won by a mile, but that's exactly why it's worth four stories, obviously.”
The receipts
Hasan Piker celebrated Ed Markey's Massachusetts primary win over Seth Moulton, calling it proof that progressive policies and trans rights are winning.
Massachusetts Democrats rewarded Ed Markey, 80, over Seth Moulton in a generational clash after Moulton urged the party to "pass the torch."
Stephen Lynch defeated progressive challenger Patrick Roath in the Massachusetts 8th Congressional District Democratic primary despite clashes over ICE.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.