Seth Moulton Makes the Only Play Left on the Board

T he vultures have long been circling for 79-year-old Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey, and now one has finally decided to swoop in to hasten along his expiration: Representative Seth Moulton, of the state’s northeastern Sixth District, has taken the plunge, yielding up his House seat for an opportunity to primary the geriatric progressive. Moulton, only 46 years old, is explicitly making his (relative) youth a selling point in his campaign. He has received encouragement from many social media quarters, and even the New York Times — with its youth obsession — is buzzing about his candidacy.

Color me skeptical. As a conservative who has long since written off the hopes of Republicans ever winning a Massachusetts Senate seat in the Age of Trump, I would actually greet someone like Seth Moulton as a (marginal) improvement over a fossil like Markey, whose House career first began in the Seventies and whose politics calcified somewhere around then as well. And that, of course, is precisely why I think he will have trouble knocking off Markey: Moulton isn’t competing for my vote, he’s competing for the votes of Massachusetts Democrats in a primary. All the wrong people are rooting for him.

Some explanation is perhaps required, given that readers of National Review don’t typically keep themselves abreast of Massachusetts politics. And why would they, unless they live there? As far as statewide oceans of Democratic blue go, Massachusetts isn’t one-tenth as interesting as the eternal tabloid circus that is New York, and isn’t one-twentieth as poorly governed as Illinois. (You probably couldn’t even name the mayor of Boston; Brandon Johnson, like Lincoln, belongs to the ages now.)

Massachusetts politics, meanwhile, is an almost exclusively Democratic story of progressive elites warring amongst themselves for control of just how far left the state will recklessly veer into oncoming traffic. The Billy Bulger types have long since departed from the scene, leaving the state divided by business and professional-class Bostonians, Cambridge academics, and Western Massachusetts hippies. (The blue-collar class, squeezed between these three groups, grumbles powerlessly.) In the recent past, Massachusetts had a habit of electing Charlie Baker–type Republican governors as a counterforce against these tendencies; the Trump era has put paid to that.

It is in that context that you need to understand Moulton’s candidacy: He is, in Massachusetts Democratic Party terms, a relative moderate. When Moulton announced that he was running the other day, he made a big show of stating that he was returning donations from AIPAC and would not accept any further ones. This sort of anti-Israeli signaling is both regrettable and now absolutely necessary for any insurgent in the modern Democratic Party — yet even more to the point, it was a statement Moulton felt compelled to make in order to distract from other positions he has staked out that make him even more problematic to the Democratic voters he is courting in a primary.

For Moulton already made himself incandescently unpopular among activists in the aftermath of the November 2024 elections by questioning transgender dogma on the matter of men playing in women’s sports. After Trump’s victory, and polls showing that massive numbers of former Democrats and independents swung to Trump over cultural alienation from the progressive project, he told the New York Times, “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Seems reasonable enough, right? Ah, but you forgot that this is Massachusetts, a land where progressives read Moulton’s last sentence and nod their heads vigorously — in agreement: You should be afraid to say that. So he was instantly disowned by his party: Governor Maura Healey denounced him by name; several of his fellow legislators did as well. Tufts University temporarily announced it would no longer recommend applicants for internships to his congressional office. And in an utterly delightful blast of irony, foamy-mouthed progressive activists burned Moulton in effigy during a protest in Salem, Mass., located in his district.

I can guarantee you that the progressive and LGBT activists which make up the thrumming engine of northeastern Democratic base politics have not forgotten about Moulton’s apostasy. In fact, I am fairly sure that this is why Moulton is running for the Senate: They promised him a fierce primary in 2026 for his ideological deviation — toward “Trumpist thought,” and at such a painful moment, no less — and his race would likely have been a meatgrinder even in victory. (The open seat primary for MA-6 will now become a fascinating little petri dish of factional progressive bloodshed.) So Moulton didn’t jump so much as he was pushed: He has chosen to abandon his seat for a greater gamble rather than fight a miserable battle to retain a thankless job.

Once you understand Moulton’s positioning his calculus becomes clear. Will it actually work, though, or is it just “something to do” for a representative otherwise caught in a party-internal pincer? I suspect the latter: This is his best option remaining, but that doesn’t make it a great one. Anything can happen — maybe Markey simply decides to resign in a month to spare himself a bruising primary — but unless Ed Markey melts like Joe Biden did onstage a year ago, he retains the nomination and thus the seat.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that the summer of 2026 feels like a terribly inopportune time for a moderate Massachusetts Democrat to primary a progressive Massachusetts Democrat from the relative right. Moulton has instantly picked up endorsements from people like Matt Yglesias, the so-called “Abundance” wing of the party. This is the losing faction, in a party now run — just as Republicans have been since Trump — by the demons of their id rather than the better angels of their nature.

The other reason is that this isn’t Markey’s first rodeo when it comes to primary challenges. In 2020, he faced what was initially tipped to be a fierce primary challenge for his Senate seat — from a Kennedy scion no less. The ease with which Markey disposed of political entryist Joseph Kennedy III — by hugging Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, fellow Massachusetts Senator (and progressive icon) Liz Warren, and the Green New Deal — is fair indication of how well Markey weathered an attack from his left, and by someone making the same “youth” and “time for change” arguments as Moulton is making now.

In its coverage of his Senate announcement, the New York Times notes this, but adds hopefully that this is “a starkly different moment.” I agree with the Times, and thus ask why they think someone challenging Markey not from the left but the right of his positions will do any better than last time. That isn’t the mood of the Democratic Party, not right now at least. But I have been wrong before.