Rep. Seth Moulton speaks during an election night event on Sept. 1, 2026, in Boston, after losing the Massachusetts’ Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. Photo: Reba Saldanha/AP
Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey comfortably defeated Rep. Seth Moulton in his Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday, in what the media — and Moulton himself — had described as a “generational” challenge.
The framing is understandable: In a country suffering under gerontocratic rule, Markey is 80 and Moulton is 47.
Age, however, was the least of what was at stake in Moulton’s run from the decaying center of the Democratic Party. Moulton ran on a conservative line, recycling right-wing talking points and echoing Donald Trump to suggest, erroneously, that Democrats have been failing because they have not been conservative enough.
“There’s only 12 trans athletes in the whole of the NCAA. We should have been embracing them.”
Markey may be 80 years old, but his campaign did precisely what Democrats must if they want to appeal to progressives and bring in a broad working-class voter base: He ran on issues of economic inequality, taxing billionaires, green energy, and universal health care — all while refusing to jettison support for vulnerable minorities, especially trans people.
Meanwhile Moulton, claiming to represent a break in the status quo, repeated precisely the tired centrist playbook that has both failed America’s multiracial working class and failed to win elections. He punched left and, as Markey himself highlighted, threw trans kids “under the bus.”
In a risible misreading of the Democrats’ 2024 presidential election loss, Moulton suggested that his party had shown too much care for trans rights. (It had not.)
“I have two little girls,” Moulton told the New York Times just after the November 2024 election. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”
It was only last month that Moulton offered a tempered apology for the anti-trans remarks — and only because Markey had lambasted him during a debate.
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“He just took the whole playbook of MAGA and Trump, and he blamed those kids for the loss,” said Markey, who has been consistent in his advocacy for trans rights. “We should have been loving those kids. There’s only 12 trans athletes in the whole of the NCAA. We should have been embracing them.”
Indeed, we should question the validity of this so-called “debate” entirely: Why did the moderator of a Senate primary debate even feel the need to ask a question about trans girls in sports at all?
This is not, after all, a political problem in need of addressing in Massachusetts, or anywhere else. It is a ghoulish far-right panic that has been baselessly elevated into a hot-button issue, with the help of Democratic cowardice.
Fox News, of all places, noted that Markey is “one of the few Democrats running this midterm cycle who is continuing to push for transgender rights, particularly in sports” — as if that were a bad thing.
A “Power to the People” rally with Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., at the IBEW Local 103 facility in Boston on Aug. 29, 2026. Photo: Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
“There is good evidence that transgender issues were a major part of Markey’s victory, too,” wrote reporter and trans advocate Erin Reed. “In the final days of the campaign, a UMass/Amherst poll asked primary voters how a candidate who embraces anti-trans positions or policies would impact their vote. In that poll, a whopping 67% stated it would make their vote less likely for that candidate.”
Markey, the longtime incumbent, was already at an advantage. And no doubt proselytizers for Democratic Party conservatism will stress that Markey’s victory in deep-blue Massachusetts cannot offer lessons for Democrats running in less progressive territory. This again would be to selectively learn the wrong lessons from Kamala Harris’s spectacular 2024 failure.
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It should not need repeating that Democrats in 2024 campaigned on Republican talking points, with Harris donning khaki for photo ops at the Arizona border. If Donald Trump’s campaign attacking trans people gained purchase, it is because Democrats roundly failed to answer it by demystifying right-wing anti-trans fearmongering. They also failed to offer a robust, class-focused platform to vote for*.*
Being nearly half someone’s age does not constitute a generational challenge; contesting the staid ways of a generational establishment does. Moulton did nothing of the sort.
Markey said it best on Tuesday: “Generational change isn’t about compromising.”
The post Seth Moulton Sold Out Trans Kids — and Lost His Senate Race appeared first on The Intercept.
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