Democrats have spent the summer ousting long-serving incumbents in primaries across the country. On Tuesday, Massachusetts voters will decide whether that generational revolt extends to the 80-year-old Ed Markey, whose younger Democratic rival has argued that the incumbent is simply too old to serve another term. But the Senate primary in this heavily Democratic state flips a central dynamic of previous contests, where youthful progressive insurgents have targeted – and in several cases, toppled – older incumbents they derided as avatars of an outmoded cautious establishment.
In something of a role reversal, it is the long-serving Markey who is positioned as the voice of the progressive left, while 47-year-old Seth Moulton, a member of the House of Representatives, has moved some of his more moderate positions closer to those of his older rival in an effort to win over a younger voting cohort. Polls indicate that Markey – who was first elected to Congress in 1976, before Moulton was born – is poised to confound concerns over his age by winning election for a third full term, at the end of which he would be 86. Markey’s leftwing credentials have been burnished by endorsements from other high-profile progressives, including Bernie Sanders, the leftwing independent senator from Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren, his fellow Massachusetts senator.
In a recent televised debate, Markey, who became a senator in a 2013 special election to replace John Kerry, when he resigned to become US secretary of state, attempted to tackle the age issue head on. I am criss-crossing the state. I’m fighting for families,” the senator said.
You’ve done a couple,” he told Markey. It’s a lot of work to represent this entire state.” But it was when the debate turned to technology and the candidates’ personal use of artificial intelligence that the age question appeared to sharpen. Asked whether the senator used AI platforms like ChatGPT in his work, Markey replied that he uses “whatever is inside of my iPhone and my iPad – whatever comes up”.
Moulton seized on that response as evidence that the incumbent did not fully understand the latest technology and how it was poised to transform every sector of society. He apologized at a recent debate for previously saying in the fallout of Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump in 2024 that he did not want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete”. He has said he would not vote for the Democrats’ current leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, if elected.
Schumer, 75, has been portrayed as a symbol of what critics say is an out-of-touch and ageing establishment leadership that has left younger and left-leaning voters disenchanted. In blue Massachusetts, the Democratic primary often decides who wins office. An Emerson College Polling survey released on Sunday, suggested voters are willing to look past Markey’s age.
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