BOSTON — On paper, Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts seems primed to be the next in a string of older Democrats thrown out of office.
At 80, he’s the oldest Senate Democrat running for reelection this year. He recently said he didn’t know what artificial-intelligence platforms were inside his devices. The Markeyverse — a loose network of meme accounts run by young progressives that Markey credited for his last election victory — has diminished.
But Markey is comfortably ahead in polls and well-positioned to keep his job in Tuesday’s Democratic primary against Rep. Seth Moulton, who is 47 and argues their party needs a “new generation of leadership.”
Markey has maintained a strong youth following with a liberal voting record and an embrace of progressive policies to address affordability and the threat of AI. Unlike the four young left-wing candidates who toppled establishment Democrats this year, Moulton is more centrist and has angered voters in the liberal state for comments about transgender athletes.
“I frankly don’t care how old a politician is,” Bailey Kelly, a 20-year-old Tufts University student, said in an interview at a recent Markey rally in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. “I care if their ideas match those of the next generation.”
Markey, first elected to the Senate in 2013 after 37 years in the House, made a similar argument in a recent debate with Moulton.
“It’s not your age, it’s the age of your ideas that are important,” he said. “And in this race, I’m the youngest guy.”
This appeal worked before.
Six years ago, Markey fended off a primary challenge from 39-year-old then-Rep. Joe Kennedy, who also argued the incumbent’s time had come and gone after nearly five decades in Congress. The online Markeyverse formed during the campaign, embracing him for his leadership on the Green New Deal to drastically reduce carbon emissions and to promote broader progressive policies on health care, housing and education.
Markey’s progressive record still resonates with Massachusetts’s youth in this election, according to Tatishe Nteta, a pollster and political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has surveyed the race.
“People recognize that Markey is old. But fundamentally that’s not viewed as negative because he also has experience, and he is generally popular,” Nteta said.
Youth advocacy organizations including Gen-Z for Change and Voters of Tomorrow have endorsed Markey, as did Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), the high-profile 36-year-old progressive.
In interviews with 10 young voters across Boston on a recent weekend, only one who planned to back Moulton raised Markey’s age as a concern. Some of the concerns came from older voters, including Arleen Frechette, 60, who called Markey “feeble” as she walked down the Boston Common with her husband.
While Markey is counting on his progressive politics to help him prevail, the rebellion against older politicians has come for liberals, too. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colorado), then 68, lost to a 29-year-old democratic socialist despite touting her longtime support for Medicare-for-all. Rep. John B. Larson (D-Connecticut), 78, lost to a 47-year-old challenger perceived as more moderate.
“Age is the issue that comes up by far and away the most with voters we speak to,” said Doug Rubin, an adviser to Moulton’s campaign. “There’s people who think Senator Markey has done well, or like him, but think that 50 years in Congress is too much and think that it’s time to pass the torch.”
Affordability as a youth issue
While Markey developed a reputation on Capitol Hill as a fighter against climate change — winning him the support of the Sunrise Movement and other environmental groups — he has shifted his emphasis.
The share of his weekly posts and emails referencing climate has fallen in recent years, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Markey now frames the Green New Deal, alongside Medicare-for-all, as solutions to the affordability crisis for young people. He claims credit for principles of the Green New Deal that made their way into the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which dedicated roughly $370 billion to curbing harmful emissions and promoting green technology. Such policies will lower energy bills and generate economic growth, Markey said.
“It’s an agenda for their lives, and they know that that is what I fight for,” Markey said in an interview with The Post.
Affordability ranks as one of the biggest problems that young voters believe the country faces, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The poll found young people were more likely than older people to worry about inflation, with 70 percent of people ages 18 to 29 describing it as a “very big problem.” Only 46 percent said the same of climate change.
Alan Tanner, a 28-year-old Boston resident, said he likes Markey’s environmental record, but affordability is his top priority in the midterm elections.
“I can’t shop for reasonable prices in my own city,” Tanner said while waiting to take a photo with the senator at a rally at Roxbury Community College.
Tanner has struggled to pay rent before. During the coronavirus pandemic, he was furloughed as a cleaner at a Boston Harbor hotel, as the sole breadwinner in the publicly subsidized housing he shared with his mother. Today, he’s fearful for his mother who now lives in a nursing home paid for by Medicaid, a health insurance program cut under President Donald Trump’s signature domestic policy law. He doesn’t like that Moulton does not support Medicare-for-all. (Moulton supports a universal health care model that would give Americans the choice of a private insurer.)
Rubin, Moulton’s campaign adviser, said it’s inaccurate to frame the congressman as a moderate.
“There are two progressives in this race,” he said.
Winning over the youth
Asked in a recent debate which AI platforms he frequents, a slightly flustered Markey said he uses whatever is in his iPhone or iPad, and doesn’t “know what companies my iPad might be using.”
Moulton pounced on that answer to paint Markey as out of touch. He released the exchange as a campaign ad, with the accompanying text: “It’s time for a new generation of leadership.”
Kelly, the Tufts student, said Markey’s answer didn’t bother her because his record in Congress mattered more. In July, Markey announced an “AI Accountability Agenda,” including legislation to regulate AI platforms and their impact on the environment.
Kelly also runs the Instagram and X account @markeyverse, now an official project of the College Democrats of Massachusetts. It’s a reimagining of the multiple accounts run by unaffiliated, individual activists, including high school students too young to vote, that constituted Twitter’s 2020 Markeyverse.
Kelly’s account has garnered relatively low engagement, including only 40 likes on a compilation video of animals dancing with the caption “pov: you just voted for Ed Markey for US Senate.”
The original Markeyverse fractured in 2021 amid conflict between Israel and Hamas, and a Markey statement assigning blame to both sides. Prominent Markeyverse accounts — @edsreplyguys and @students4markey — sought to “hold Markey accountable” for this comment. Following an open letter from his 2020 campaign supporters, Markey offered a second statement, which invoked “defenseless Palestinian families who are already living in fear for their lives and the lives of their children.”
Although the Sunrise Movement — the youth climate movement that phone-banked for Markey in 2020 — criticized the senator’s response to that conflict, they endorsed him again this year.
“Young people saw his willingness to follow youth movements’ energy,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, Sunrise’s executive director.
Shiney-Ajay says that young progressives are encouraged that Markey has not received money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group, during his Senate career.
In November, Moulton pledged to return funding he had received from AIPAC and to refuse funding in the future, citing its alignment with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Moulton’s attempts to move left have fallen flat with some young voters.
On a stroll with a friend in Boston Common, Eddy Lambert, 35, lamented the cost of living in one of the country’s most expensive cities for renters and handing over a third of his income to his landlord.
But he’s excited to vote for his 80-year-old senator, who he believes can help ease such costs.
“Age doesn’t matter when it comes to Ed Markey,” Lambert said.
Kevin Crowe and Scott Clement in Washington contributed to this report.
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