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Page B1From§Eachthe noon edition — 2 September 2026
Moulton Dropped Trans Kids To Court Moderates; Incumbents Held, And He Lost Anyway
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY: A Political Strategy, dead at the ballot box, age approximately one election cycle.
The strategy was born sometime this spring, when Representative Seth Moulton calculated that distance from trans kids would read to Massachusetts moderates as toughness rather than what the Intercept, in its obituary notice, simply called selling out. It was not a subtle strategy. It did not pretend to be principle; it was positioning, the political equivalent of throwing ballast over the side of a boat that was, it turns out, not actually sinking.…
…(cont) The strategy is survived by the incumbents it was supposed to unseat. Senator Ed Markey held his seat. The wire called it plainly: incumbents hold on in Massachusetts, present tense, the kind of sentence that runs the same week a challenger's concession does. The strategy is also survived by the trans kids it was built on top of, who did not get a vote in how they were used and do not get much mention in most of the coverage of why the race ended the way it did.
The strategy was preceded in death by several other Democratic strategies of similar design and identical mechanism — the calculation that a vulnerable constituency makes good ballast, that abandoning ten thousand kids buys you the fifty moderate votes you were short. Actuarially, this is not a good trade. It has never once been a good trade. The kids stay abandoned either way; the fifty votes are never actually there when the polls close, because the fifty votes were never voting on this.
Malarkey is the word this obituarist reaches for, and it is the right one: not because the strategy was cruel, though it was, but because it did not even work on its own terms, which is the one thing a purely cynical strategy owes you. A body that dies of the thing it pretended would save it is a particular kind of penny-ante tragedy, the kind that gets a paragraph instead of a chapter.
No further primary challenges are expected from this line of reasoning in the current cycle, though this obituarist has been wrong about that before and will likely be wrong again before November.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donors and strategists direct their next calculation toward a constituency that will still be there, un-abandoned, when the votes are actually counted.
“They sacrifice trans kids to buy fifty votes that were never actually on the table, and then they lose the fifty votes and the kids stay sacrificed either way — that's the whole scam of the 'electability' argument in one primary. Somebody's kid becomes a bargaining chip for a bargain that doesn't exist.”
The receipts
Running as a progressive, Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey forced his centrist challenger to apologize for his anti-trans remarks. The post Seth Moulton Sold Out Trans Kids — and Lost His Senate Race appeared first on The Intercept .
The successful incumbent, who turned 80 during the campaign, co-authored the Green New Deal and backs Medicare for All.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.