Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton announced Wednesday that he’s launching a primary challenge to U.S. Sen. Ed Markey in the 2026 election cycle, casting Markey as part of a stale Democratic establishment that’s failing to fight back effectively against Republican President Donald Trump.
“[D]emocrats have failed to stop Donald Trump’s harmful, racist agenda,” Moulton says in a campaign kickoff video. “Our party has clung to the status quo, insisted on using the same old playbook, and isn’t fighting hard enough. The next generation will keep paying the costs if we don’t change course.
“We’re in a crisis, and with everything we learned last election, I just don’t believe Senator Markey should be running for another six-year term at 80 years old,” Moulton adds. “Even more, I don’t think someone’s who’s been in Congress for half a century is the right person to meet this moment and win the future. Senator Markey’s a good man, but it’s time for a new generation of leadership.”
A recent poll conducted for the Fiscal Alliance Foundation showed Moulton, who represents much of the North Shore, leading Markey in a then-hypothetical matchup, with 43% support among likely voters to Markey’s 21%. Among Democrats only, however, Moulton’s margin was narrower: he led Markey 38% to 30%.
Five years ago, Markey faced a primary challenge from then-Rep. Joe Kennedy III. Markey seemed energized by the contest and ultimately dispatched Kennedy in the primary election, 55% to 45%, buoyed in part by an unexpected wave of young supporters.
Ray La Raja, a political scientist at UMass Amherst and the co-director of the UMass Poll, said it may be difficult for Markey to garner the same level of support from younger voters in this election cycle that he did in 2020 when he faced Kennedy in the primary.
“[In] 2020, it was easier to mobilize people who usually don’t turn out,” La Raja said. “2026 is a midterm; youth are less likely to show up, and these are the folks who supported Markey in the past. And even the young folks might be tired. Markey, again, is six years older; he’ll be 86 at the end of his term [if he wins re-election].”
Moulton was criticized for comments he made last year about the Democratic Party’s approach to transgender issues. He argued, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, that Democrats shutting down debate on finding a “a reasonable, rational position” on trans issues was actually paving the way for Republican attacks, including Trump’s early assertion in a presidential executive order that only two immutable genders exist.
In 2018, Moulton led an unsuccessful push to keep then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from serving another term in that role, using language that resembled his current critiques of Markey.
Moulton also briefly ran for president in the 2020 election cycle, but dropped out and endorsed eventual nominee Joe Biden in August 2019.
Erin O’Brien, a political scientist at UMass Boston, said that in the wake of Joe Biden’s unexpected exit from the 2024 presidential race, age has become a liability in Democratic politics in a way that it wasn’t when Markey fended off Kennedy five years ago.
“Ed Markey certainly does not like Joe Biden right now,” O’Brien said. “The age factor has become much more of something that Democrats are going to talk out loud about.”
The Markey campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from GBH News. Campaign spokesperson Cam Charbonnier told POLITICO’s Massachusetts Playbook Moulton that Markey is working to reopen the government.
“While Congressman Moulton is launching a political campaign during a government shutdown, Senator Markey is doing his job — voting against Trump’s extremist agenda and working to stop the MAGA attacks on health care so that we can reopen the government,” Charbonnier wrote. “That’s what leadership looks like and what the residents of Massachusetts expect from their Senator.”
