The results are coming in from last night’s primaries across Massachusetts. GBH politics reporter Adam Reilly joined GBH’s Morning Edition host Tori Bedford in studio Wednesday morning to break down everything we need to know. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Tori Bedford: How are you feeling?
Adam Reilly: Exhilarated by democracy in action.
Bedford: Let’s go.
Reilly: I guess.
Bedford: OK, well, thank you so much. And thank you to everyone in the newsroom who was out all night.
Let’s get into it. So let’s start with maybe one of the most high-profile races for U.S. Senate. Incumbent Ed Markey easily won. Congressman Seth Moulton, his challenger, put a ton of money into this campaign. He was calling for a new generation of leadership.
He continued to bring up Markey’s age. Markey is 80. And Markey still won by a pretty big margin.
Reilly: Yeah, about 30 points. Well, I think starting off with the age piece. As you say, Moulton’s central argument was Markey shouldn’t be elected to another term because he’s too old. Markey is 80. Moulton is 47. Moulton was arguing that it’s time for a new generation of leadership.
And I think it’s clear that a majority of Democratic primary voters just thought that was kind of a thin case to make against someone like Markey, who’s been in office for a while and is pretty popular among Democrats here in Massachusetts.
I also think that Moulton paid a huge price for those comments that he made to the New York Times on the heels of the last presidential election, where he suggested the Democrats were too doctrinaire when it comes to transgender rights. He said, I think it bears quoting again in full, “I have 2 little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
I talked with several people at Markey’s event last night who were, I think it’s fair to say, mortified by those comments from Moulton and were really relishing the prospect of voting for Markey to sort of send a message that they didn’t agree with Moulton.
On this front, I would like to play a little sound that we have of Taylor Hack, who’s the executive director of the Christopher Street Project. Hack was the first person to introduce Markey before he spoke.
Taylor Hack, pre-recorded: There have been people in this party who looked at the cruelty transgender Americans were facing and decided that maybe if Democrats sacrificed the right people, abandon the right kids and distanced ourselves from the right community, voters would reward us for it. Tonight should bury that idea.
Bedford: So you think that was kind of a death knell for —
Reilly: I think that was a huge factor in the race.
The only other thing I would mention on Markey is we talked about Moulton’s attempts to link Markey to Jeffrey Epstein and how there turned out to not really be any “there” there.
In retrospect, that looks to me like the efforts of a campaign that knew they were going to lose to throw something against the wall in hopes that it might stick. And I’m guessing that more people voted for Ed Markey because that attack was made than would have if it hadn’t been made.
Bedford: Yeah, I think a lot of that turned a lot of people off.
Reilly: Yep, agreed.
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Bedford: So in Seth Moulton’s congressional seat now, we’ve got Dan Koh.
Reilly: We have Dan Koh, assuming that Dan Koh wins in the general election.
Dan Koh beat out Tram Nguyen, who had all sorts of momentum in the week or two before the election. She was endorsed by Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley and Lori Trahan, endorsed by the Boston Globe editorial board.
But Dan Koh raised a crazy amount of money in this race. I think he was incredibly well-resourced. He’s also a known quantity. He was chief of staff to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh. He was a presidential advisor under Joe Biden, and he had run for Congress before for the seat currently occupied by Trahan. Then his hometown of Andover was moved into Seth Moulton’s former district.
So I think that he was just able to sort of establish a level of name recognition before the election happened that Nguyen couldn’t match. I couldn’t watch TV without seeing an ad about how Dan Koh knows that opposing Donald Trump is a marathon, not a sprint, and he’s run 82 marathons. I saw it again and again and again.
Bedford: It’s interesting — Seth Moulton had kind of tried to position his race as a change of the guard, a new generation of leadership. Sort of in line with what we’re seeing in a lot of races across the country where you’ve got a more progressive candidate coming in to unseat a longtime incumbent. But here in Massachusetts, I mean, he was the more moderate candidate.
Reilly: He was the more moderate candidate.
Bedford: And it was also a huge night for incumbents, right? Stephen Lynch wins the congressional district despite a challenge from Patrick Roath.
Reilly: Jeromie Whalen failed in his bid to unseat Richard Neal. And they were the two I thought that were most viable when it came to challenging —
Bedford: And Richard Neal has been in office for almost four decades. This is what he said last night.
Rep. Richard Neal, pre-recorded: There is not a family in Western or Central Massachusetts that has not benefited from my work or been impacted by my influence in Congress.
Reilly: I was struck by that when I heard it on our airwaves earlier today. That sounded to me like a guy who was genuinely bristling at the fact that he’d been challenged and really took it personally and wanted to say, “No, no, no, I’ve made your lives better if you’re in my district. You got to get that. You have to understand that.” That stood out to me as an authentic piece of sound.
Bedford: We also saw our new Republican gubernatorial nominee for the general election. Army veteran and health tech CEO Mike Minogue will face Maura Healey in November. She had come out against him with a couple of ads.
Reilly: Well, the Mass Democratic Party is airing ads calling him, I think, is it MAGA Mike?
Bedford: MAGA Mike, yeah. And she was trying to align him with Trump throughout her campaign.
Reilly: I don’t think that’s going to be overly tough for her to do. Whether it’ll be disqualifying remains to be seen. Obviously, we like to elect centrist Republican governors here in Massachusetts. There’s a real affinity for picking them to, I guess, keep Democrats in check. It’s kind of the only place that we tend to elect Republicans.
And whether Menogue is, in fact, moderate enough — or can become moderate enough — to make that pitch to voters is an open question.
Bedford: I’m just looking. I think that the Brownsberger-Lander race is still too close to call.
Reilly: It is too close to call.
That’s one of two races where Boston Mayor Michelle Wu tried to knock off members of the state Senate who were opposed to her plan to shift some of the city’s tax burden from residents to property owners. So she basically said, “I don’t like what Will Brownsberger and Nick Collins have done here, and I’m going to support candidates to try to unseat them.”
Nick Collins managed to keep his seat. So Wu is at best going to go 1 for 2, and she may go 0 for 2.
