Massachusetts voters cared about Ed Markey's age. They just hated Seth Moulton more

Hello and welcome to your post-Election Day "well, actually, the discourse is wrong" post. Today's topic: Sen. Ed Markey's dominant win over Rep. Seth Moulton. In one corner, we have the national media insisting that this result shows that voters don't care about age after all, since the 80-year-old Markey defeated the 47-year-old Moulton. In the other corner, my Bluesky feed was full of people attributing Moulton's loss to his reprehensible attempt, following the 2024 election, to scapegoat trans people.

Let's stipulate at the outset that there is an imbalance between the national media and people with good-sized social media followings who may also write or podcast for smaller platforms than the New York Times. Moreover, those people are a lot closer to being right about what the outcome means. But it's important to understand the whole picture.

First, the age thing. The NYT's first takeaway from this election was "voters didn't care about Markey's age." Like hell they didn't. Maybe some of them genuinely didn't care. But based on what I heard from other Massachusetts voters (which is, for the record, as high an evidence standard as the takemeisters at the NYT are applying), far more cared but were willing to overlook it because Moulton was so terrible.

Markey's age was a regular subject of conversation among many people I talked to and they were universally unhappy that he had decided to run again at this age. The vast majority of them were voting for him only because the alternative was so bad. But, for instance, I did hear from a Markey canvasser who had talked to a Moulton voter who was unhappy about being a Moulton voter but was too incensed about Markey's age to be able to support him. I want to also note that this was not the ageism of the young: I talked to any number of people in their 70s and 80s who were particularly vocal about Markey's poor judgment in running for a six-year term at an age they felt keenly could be an issue in his ability to do the job well.

Second, Moulton's anti-trans comments. To be fair, the NYT did list those as the second takeaway from the race. And this part of the discourse is more accurate than the "voters didn't care about Markey's age" claims, because voters absolutely held it against Moulton that he went out the day after the 2024 elections to boohoo about the imaginary possibility that his delicate daughters might be "run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete" and that, "as a Democrat I'm supposed to be afraid to say that." 

That is not how we roll in Massachusetts and I'm proud we made that clear.

But part of why those comments stuck so hard to Moulton was because they were part of a pattern with him. As one person I know put it, "Seth is almost uniquely a fuckhead." 

Moulton sucks in three different ways. First, he casts bad votes. Lots of them. That's not terribly unique – this Election Day Massachusetts Democratic primary voters in a few House districts went for people who have voted or will vote with Republicans too much – but it's there. 

Second, those anti-trans comments were not the first or the last time Moulton has embraced Republican messaging, and it's not the first time he's done so while painting himself as a brave defier of Democratic orthodoxy. For instance, as Jonathan Cohn wrote, "Seth Moulton has voted for resolutions blaming Black Lives Matter for the death of cops, expressing gratitude toward ICE, and commending Border Patrol agents as they held immigrants in deadly conditions," and "has lambasted the Fair Share Amendment, MA’s surtax on income over $1 million, as 'alienat[ing]' and has criticized 'progressive populism' as 'great for Democrats if we want to continue losing.'" The Fair Share Amendment, by the way, won a statewide vote and has gone on to allow more than $6 billion in education and transportation investments. 

Moulton is out of step with Massachusetts voters on a lot of issues, and given the opportunity he will always posture in the media about it.

Third, Moulton is an obviously slimy opportunist. He is always, always, looking for the next move to aggrandize himself. He was elected to the House in 2014. When Democrats retook the House in 2018, Moulton was at the forefront of an effort to keep Nancy Pelosi from being speaker of the House. It was a giant failure, but it got Seth Moulton's name in the news for a while. Just over a year later, Moulton launched a presidential campaign, which was also a giant flop. Then this year he came for Ed Markey, and had another embarrassing loss. 

Seth Moulton's foremost conviction is that Seth Moulton is destined for greatness, and that the path to having that greatness recognized is by saying he's going to save the Democratic Party by defeating its leaders from the right. I think Massachusetts voters saw that and refused to be the worshipful masses in Moulton's headcanon about his own destiny. And yes, part of that was a specific rejection of scapegoating trans kids for a tough 2024 election, but if we focus entirely on that comment we miss so much of what makes Moulton uniquely a fuckhead, and what Massachusetts voters rejected on Tuesday.