Democratic Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton, who has bucked his party’s stances on transgender issues, will challenge Sen. Ed Markey for his Senate seat in 2026, pitting the 46-year-old Marine veteran against one of the Democratic Party’s oldest progressives.
Moulton made age a central issue in his announcement video, saying, “I don’t think someone who’s been in Congress for half a century is the right person to meet this moment and win the future.”
“We’re in a crisis,” Moulton went on, “and with everything we learned last election, I just don’t believe Senator Markey should be running for another 6-year term at 80 years old.”
Markey, 79, was first elected to Congress in 1976 and is the longest-serving Democrat in office. When he last faced a primary challenge in 2020, he had been in Congress longer than his opponent, then-Massachusetts congressman Joe Kennedy III, had been alive. In recent years, Markey has become known for his embrace of far-left policies, having cosponsored the Green New Deal with socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), supported Court-packing and socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I., Vt.) universal health care plan, and called sex-change treatments for minors a “human right.”
While Moulton’s campaign video emphasized the congressman’s progressive bona fides, he has criticized his own party in the past. During last year’s presidential election, he warned then-candidate Kamala Harris that she would need to lay out “real, solid policy proposals” because “the honeymoon’s inevitably going to end.” Harris went on to lose to President Donald Trump in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
Last November, Moulton told the New York Times that “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone.”
“I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” Moulton said, “but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
These comments led to a top aide’s resignation, primary threats, and protests outside his Salem office.
Moulton said in his announcement video that “Democrats have failed to stop” Trump’s agenda because “our party has clung to the status quo, insisted on using the same old playbook, and isn’t fighting hard enough.”
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