Many Democrats of a certain age took the same message from the party’s 2024 debacle: Voters are sick of the old guard and craving younger, more aggressive leaders. Better to retire on your own terms than suffer the fate of Joe Biden, forced to stand down from his reelection campaign after a public humiliation. Nancy Pelosi, the 86-year-old former speaker, announced her exit from the House, as did her longtime lieutenant, 87-year-old Steny Hoyer. Senators Dick Durbin (81) and Jeanne Shaheen (79) passed up reelection bids this year, and so, too, did twosenators merely in their late 60s.
Senator Ed Markey, 80, heeded no such warning, and evidently, he didn’t need to. The Massachusetts Democrat is one of just two current senators whose tenures in Congress date to the presidency of Gerald Ford. But tonight the oldest Democratic senator on the ballot in 2026 trounced his much-younger primary opponent, Representative Seth Moulton. The Associated Press called the race a half hour after polls closed, with Markey leading by nearly 50 points.
In a race that pitted ideology against age, Massachusetts Democrats opted for a progressive stalwart who will be 86 at the end of another six-year term over a more moderate 47-year-old challenger. Moulton, an Iraq War veteran who is concluding his sixth term in the House, moved left to appeal to a statewide primary electorate. But he could not hope to outflank Markey, who won support from Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Instead, Moulton urged voters to embrace “a new generation of leadership” and argued that he could more effectively fight for liberal causes than an incumbent in the twilight of his career.
Markey had already faced that kind of challenge before, and won. Six years ago, he handily defeated then-Representative Joe Kennedy III, a grandson of Robert F. Kennedy who contended that the incumbent, after so many decades in office, was no longer up to the task. Young progressives, unimpressed with what remained of the Kennedy aura and appreciative of Markey’s record championing the Green New Deal, rallied to his side. But that race preceded Biden’s flame-out in 2024 and the reckoning over the Democratic Party’s gerontocracy.
Some Massachusetts Democrats believed that Markey could be newly vulnerable, especially if a popular progressive such as Representative Ayanna Pressley, who is 52, decided to challenge him. Mary Anne Marsh, a longtime Democratic strategist in the state, told me that after seeing the reception Pressley received at a party convention last year, she became convinced that “if Ayanna runs, she wins.” But Pressley opted to run for reelection to the House, leaving Moulton to challenge Markey.
Moulton has never lacked ambition—he led a failed bid to oust Pelosi as party leader in 2018 and waged a short-lived presidential campaign the following year—but he’s neither as progressive nor as well liked as Pressley. He built a reputation as a moderate in the House Democratic caucus, and after President Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in 2024, Moulton angered many on the left by accusing his party of being “afraid” to say that transgender athletes should not play women’s sports. He has since offered a partial apology to the transgender community, but the line became fodder for Markey, who said he “threw trans kids under the bus.” The issue was emblematic of Moulton’s struggle to convince progressives in Massachusetts that he shared their values. “He’s tried to become a progressive, but he does it by defining progressive in a way that nobody believes,” Marsh told me. “He tried to become something that he’s not.”
The Massachusetts race was a rare Democratic primary this year in which U.S. policy toward Israel did not become a flash point, as both candidates criticized Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and opposed new military aid to Israel. (Moulton announced last year that he would return donations from AIPAC.)
Both public polling and Markey’s internal surveys showed a closer race until earlier this summer, when the incumbent began to pull away. A Markey adviser told me voters had not really tuned in to the campaign yet, and media attention was focused on higher-profile Democratic primaries elsewhere. Markey’s age also did not become a big factor, perhaps because the years since 2020 have been kinder to him than they were to Biden. His support reflected a frequently overlooked nuance in the debate over whether the party needs new leadership: Older progressive leaders, particularly the 84-year-old Sanders, remain popular. “There’s a difference between being old and being part of the old guard,” the Markey adviser, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told me. “Younger voters love Ed Markey, younger voters love Bernie Sanders, younger voters love Elizabeth Warren, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that they take younger voters seriously.”
Moulton tried to align Markey with a Democratic establishment that he said had failed to deliver progressive wins. He frequently invoked the name of Senator Chuck Schumer, vowing to oppose the New Yorker if he seeks to remain the Democratic leader. And Moulton even accused Markey of having ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, an attack that, according to Marsh, backfired so badly, it might have sealed Moulton’s defeat. (Markey denied any affiliation with Epstein.)
In the end, Massachusetts Democrats preferred Markey’s progressivism over Moulton’s relative youth. He might have been helped by the fact that the stakes in this primary were not as high as they were elsewhere this year—and certainly much lower than when the party pushed Biden to withdraw in 2024. Massachusetts is not in danger of going Republican in November. Democratic voters wanted a trusted fighter to wage battle against Trump for the next two years, and—they hope—for transformative progressive policies in the four years after that. They didn’t seem to care much that the fighter they chose happens to be 80 years old.
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