Hasan Piker celebrated Ed Markey's Massachusetts primary win over Seth Moulton, calling it proof that progressive policies and trans rights are winning.
Page A4From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 2 September 2026
Progressive commentator cheers primary win as Massachusetts re-elects same three incumbents for six more years.
As it ran on the front
Let's talk about the word 'upset.' Political reporters love that word because it implies something actually moved. This week in Massachusetts, nothing moved. Ed Markey, seventy years... no, eighty years old, beat a challenger young enough to be his intern's kid, and the wire copy called it a 'primary,' like there was ever a chance the furniture in that room was going to rearrange itself. Richard Neal won. Stephen Lynch won. All incumbents, all projected winners, all in the same afternoon, and somewhere a cable-news kid with two million subscribers stood up and cheered like his team just made the playoffs.
Here's the trick, and it's not even a good trick, it's just a rerun: you let a young progressive run, you let them raise money, you let them get a write-up, you let the base feel like the system is listening — and then the same three names walk back into office with six more years apiece, which, by the math, is longer than some of these viewers have been legal to drink. The 'upset' was scheduled. The insurgency was cast. It's dinner theater with a mail-in ballot.…
…(cont) I'm not saying Markey's bad at the job. I'm saying the job doesn't change hands, and when the job doesn't change hands for decades, the people who hold it stop being your representatives and start being your landlords. You don't vote out a landlord. You just keep paying rent and calling it democracy.
And the cheerleading is the part that gets me. Because somewhere out there is a twenty-six-year-old who knocked on eleven thousand doors, who believed the party when it said this was their moment, who is now watching a guy with a bigger platform than the local news call an eighty-year-old's sixth term a win for the future. That kid's yard sign is still up on somebody's lawn. It's going to fade before the next primary does the exact same thing to the next kid.
Six more years. Write it down. Then check back in six years and see if the headline reads any different, because I'll tell you right now, it won't — the only thing that'll have changed is which twenty-six-year-old they let lose this time.
“The 'progressive wave' story runs every cycle, and every cycle it crashes into the same three names on the same ballot. Nobody in that photo is under seventy, and the guy cheering it on TV calls it a youth movement. The machine doesn't need to win an argument, it just needs to win the primary, forever.”
“This is exactly what voters wanted — experience, seniority, committee chairmanships that actually deliver for the district. Sure, the average age skews toward Social Security, but Congress isn't a beauty pageant, it's — wait, did I just call Ed Markey's re-election a Social Security commercial? That's not — let's just say the voters spoke.”
The receipts
The oldest senator in Massachusetts history used a progressive message to beat Representative Seth Moulton, 47, defying calls for generational change.
Representative Stephen Lynch, 71, a centrist, beat Patrick Roath, 39, in a primary that reflected the party’s generational and ideological divides.
NBC News’ Steve Kornacki breaks down numbers in the Democratic primary races in Massachusetts including U.S. Senate and House Districts 8 and 1.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.