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The Associated Press called the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate for Sen. Edward J. Markey at 8:31 p.m. Tuesday, just 31 minutes after polls closed, with Markey leading Rep. Seth Moulton 21,383 votes to 7,451 in early returns, or 74.2% to 25.8% — a margin that dwarfed the double-digit lead he carried into Election Day and blew past even the widest of the summer's public polls.
It was the second time in six years Massachusetts Democrats had been asked to retire him, and the second time they declined, this time by a wider margin than the first.
The result didn't settle whether Markey’s age matters to these voters — plenty of them told pollsters it did — so much as it confirmed what mattered more: a progressive record built over five decades, and the validators who vouch for it, still outweigh a case built mostly on the calendar.
Moulton, who ran as the generational alternative while positioning himself to Markey’s right on health care and defense, leaves the race having never led a single public poll. What he built instead — a moderate, veteran-inflected argument that the party needs new messengers — goes back on the shelf for someone else to try.
A rerun, six years later
Markey has now won this fight twice. In 2020, he turned back a challenge from then-Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, 782,694 votes to 629,359, or 55.4% to 44.5% of the 1,427,868 votes cast, running up huge margins in Cambridge, Somerville and Boston behind a coalition of young, online, ideologically driven voters that came to be called the “Markeyverse.”
Moulton’s challenge inverted the shape of that fight without changing its outcome. Kennedy had tried to outflank Markey from the left; Moulton ran from the right, positioning himself as a moderate aligned with the House’s New Democrat Coalition, and made age rather than ideology his central argument.
That inversion, in the end, made Markey’s counterattack easier to land: he could cast Moulton not as insufficiently progressive but as insufficiently Democratic at all, and did so from his first answer of the campaign’s first debate onward.
Markey will be 86 at the end of the term he just secured the right to seek. That fact was never in dispute; what remained genuinely unsettled, and remains unsettled even in defeat, was what voters were willing to do about it.
A Fiscal Alliance Foundation poll taken shortly after Moulton entered the race found that 63% of voters — surveying 750 likely voters, with a margin of error of 3.6 percentage points — said Markey should not seek re-election at all.
By August, Democratic primary voters were telling pollsters something starkly different: a University of Massachusetts Amherst survey put Markey’s job approval at 54%, and Emerson College’s final poll had him winning voters under 40 by roughly two to one.
That gap — between generalized unease about an 80-year-old senator and a primary electorate that voted for him anyway — is the paradox Tuesday’s result leaves behind.
Moulton’s own supporters cared about age; the final UNH survey found 58% of them named it as their top reason for backing him. But age functioned, in the end, as a proxy for arguments about effectiveness and strategy that Moulton could not win outright.
“Experience is not the opposite of change,” Markey said at the July 8 debate. “Experience is what you use in order to create change.”
It proved durable enough to carry him through three debates and a summer of accusations.
Money without votes
Moulton entered the race’s final stretch with more cash on hand than Markey, $1.84 million to $1.35 million as of Federal Election Commission filings covering the period through Aug. 12, and the backing of Advance Progress, an outside group that spent at least $5.4 million on his behalf — more than double the $2.2 million spent against him by the pro-Markey group Commonwealth Together.
It bought him parity in paid communication and undercut any clean “grassroots versus establishment” story; it did not buy him votes.
Markey held the institutional and ideological establishment nearly intact: Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, most of the state’s U.S. House delegation, most major labor unions and roughly 73% of delegates at May’s state Democratic convention.
Moulton’s most prominent endorsement, the Boston Globe’s editorial board, came Aug. 18 — 13 days before voters had their say, and not enough to move them.
The sharpest split between the two Democrats was never ideological. Two days after the 2024 election, Moulton told The New York Times he did not want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” a remark that drew sustained criticism from LGBTQ+ advocates and resurfaced as a live issue June 30, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states may, though are not required to, bar transgender girls from girls’ school sports.
Markey, the Senate's lead sponsor of the Transgender Bill of Rights, said Moulton had thrown “trans kids under the bus.” Moulton apologized twice on debate stages — “I deeply recognize your trauma, and I’m sorry if my comments hurt you,” he said Aug. 3 — without ever fully making the issue disappear.
Nor did his Aug. 3 accusation that Markey’s name appears “repeatedly” in newly released files connected to Jeffrey Epstein, a claim tied to a 2015 meeting Markey took with associates of a lobbyist representing a Senegalese politician whose legal fees Epstein was paying.
PolitiFact and the Globe found no evidence Markey knew of any Epstein connection and rated the claim unsupported; Markey called it “absolutely reprehensible” and denied ever meeting Epstein.
In hindsight it reads less like a turning point than a preview of the race’s late tone — an accusation built to generate a news cycle, not to move a vote count.
What comes next
Moulton was not seeking re-election to his House seat this cycle, so Tuesday’s result closes one door for him without opening another; Massachusetts Democrats were choosing his successor in the 6th District on the same ballot, from a field of six candidates.
For Markey, the win extends a congressional career now 50 years long, assuming he goes on to win the general election in a state that hasn't elected a Republican to the Senate since 2010.
Whether an 86-year-old senator is what Massachusetts Democrats had in mind when they cast those votes, or whether they were simply unwilling to bet a Senate seat on the alternative, is a question Tuesday’s numbers cannot fully answer. It is, in that sense, the same question the state’s voters left open in 2020 — deferred again, for another six years, to whoever tries next.
Will Dowd is a Massachusetts journalist who covers municipal government and community life for Winchester News. He is also the founder and editor of The Marblehead Independent, a reader-funded digital newsroom.
