Democratic primaries this year have often followed a similar script. A young left-wing contender challenges a more moderate Democratic incumbent, declaring that it is time for new leaders with novel, progressive ideas.
But in deep-blue Massachusetts, the Democratic Senate race is inverting that model, scrambling the party’s ideological and generational battle lines.
Representative Seth Moulton, 47, is running on a message of generational change as he takes on Senator Edward J. Markey, 80. The catch: Mr. Markey, who first arrived in Congress in 1976, is a progressive backed by young left-wing Democrats including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.
And his challenger, running to his right, is supported by centrists such as Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Representative Pat Ryan of New York. Mr. Moulton is best known to some Massachusetts Democrats for his efforts in 2024 to pull his party to the center on transgender rights. One of his chief endorsers is VoteVets, a group aligned with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader. (Mr. Schumer has not made an endorsement in the race.)
The primary on Tuesday will offer a measure, if an imperfect one, of how far skepticism of the gerontocracy can take a moderate in a deeply Democratic state. The winner will be an overwhelming general-election favorite.
Many Democratic voters are wary of aging politicians after President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s doomed bid for re-election in 2024. This year, Democratic House incumbents have fallen to decades-younger challengers in races in Colorado, New York, Michigan and Connecticut. But in each of those races, the winner combined a generational appeal with a progressive message.
“The experiment Moulton is running is: Can you run just on the ‘It’s time for a change’ argument?” said David Hopkins, a political science professor at Boston College. “That does land well with some people. But it may be that that alone is just not enough to depose a well-known, veteran incumbent.”
Polls suggest that Mr. Markey has pulled out to a substantial lead, though some surveys have appeared to overstate the strength of progressive candidates in recent high-profile races around the country.
Mr. Markey has, to an extent, been here before. Just six years ago, the senator fended off the much-younger Joseph P. Kennedy III, then a congressman, by running to his challenger’s left, handing the Kennedy family its first recorded electoral loss in Massachusetts.
This time, Mr. Markey has worked to outflank Mr. Moulton, assailing him for questioning whether transgender athletes should be allowed to compete in women’s and girls’ sports. In 2024, Mr. Moulton said he did not want his daughters “getting run over” by “formerly male” athletes. Mr. Markey has emerged as a rare prominent Democrat championing transgender rights; Mr. Moulton has said he is sorry if his past comments caused pain, though he has defended their substance.
Mr. Moulton, in turn, has tried to make the race less about policy than about perceptions of competency. Mr. Moulton is running to Mr. Markey’s right on key issues such as health care, but he has downplayed their policy differences.
“Senator Markey and I want the same things,” Mr. Moulton says in one campaign ad. “But wanting isn’t winning, and the old way isn’t working.”
If Mr. Markey prevails, it may not prove aging progressive Democrats are safe from younger moderate upstarts. Massachusetts, where labor groups hold great sway in Democratic politics, is tricky terrain to try to topple an incumbent, strategists say.
Mr. Moulton, who embarked on a series of quixotic pursuits that included a run for president in 2019 and a bid to block Representative Nancy Pelosi of California from becoming House speaker in 2018, has also made some enemies in the party over the years.
And Mr. Markey, with his distinctly Boston-area brogue and bearing, is broadly liked after a half-century serving the state in Congress. (He moved from the House to the Senate in 2013.)
Even at 80, Mr. Markey can seem quick on his feet. Still, he has had some hiccups in the race. During a televised debate, he could not say if he had used artificial intelligence in his work.
“I use whatever is inside of my iPhone and my iPad, whatever comes up,” the senator said. “And I don’t know what company my iPad might be using.”
Mr. Moulton, chuckling, offered, “I use A.I.” His campaign promptly turned the exchange into an advertisement.
Mr. Moulton, though, had his own debate gaffe.
In a different TV debate, Mr. Moulton asked Mr. Markey why he had taken a “meeting with a lobbyist on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein.” Mr. Markey, who appeared stunned, responded that the suggestion that he had ties to the convicted sex offender was “absolutely reprehensible.”
The attack did not appear to resonate. There is no evidence that Mr. Markey had any relationship with Mr. Epstein. The Boston Globe looked into the allegations and concluded that the facts did not support them and PolitiFact rated them “mostly false.”
Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic strategist in Massachusetts, said that the episode “really hurt” Mr. Moulton and “dramatically shifted the race.”
“It was so shocking,” Ms. Marsh said, adding, “It just didn’t ring true.”
Ms. Marsh said that she did not think that Mr. Moulton had been able to recover from the dust-up over Mr. Epstein. Now the “race to watch” in Massachusetts, she argued, might instead be a House battle in Boston that more neatly aligns with the trends of this Democratic primary season.
In that contest, Representative Stephen Lynch, a 71-year-old South Boston Democrat, is trying to overcome a challenge from Patrick Roath, a 39-year-old Jamaica Plain lawyer, who is running on a progressive platform that calls for universal health care.
Mr. Lynch has deep labor support and is widely seen as the favorite. But he is trying to win a 14th term in a changing district, which curls from the grand brownstones of Boston’s Back Bay, to heavily gentrified South Boston, to southern suburbs such as Brockton that have been reshaped by immigration.
Mr. Lynch has adopted a Rose Garden strategy, ignoring candidate forums. But he has recently gone on the attack, describing Mr. Roath in one social media post as “Sir Full of Himself.”
Mr. Roath, who has not endorsed a candidate in the Senate race, said that his campaign offered a more digestible dynamic. “The contrast,” he said, “is super crystal clear.”
Mr. Moulton, for his part, says he is still holding out hope that hunger for generational change could help him prove the polls wrong and pull off an upset in his Senate race.
“At the end of the day, the fundamental issue is, do you want more of the same?” Mr. Moulton said in an interview. “Or do you want new leadership?”
Mr. Markey, who appeared at a rally in Boston on Saturday with Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said at the event that the choice that mattered was one of ideology.
“This is the greatest gathering of progressive voices on one stage,” Mr. Markey said. “Our progressive-palooza. That’s what we have put together.”
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