Rep. Seth Moulton Announces Run for Senator Markey’s Seat in Massachusetts

Politics|Rep. Seth Moulton Announces Run for Senator Markey’s Seat in Massachusetts

Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts announced on Tuesday that he would challenge Senator Edward J. Markey, a fellow Democrat, in next year’s Senate race, with a campaign message highlighting his relative youth. Mr. Moulton is 46, and Mr. Markey, who was elected to Congress almost 50 years ago, is 79.

In a news release and video launching his campaign, Mr. Moulton leaned hard into the idea that the Democratic Party must change and embrace fresh leadership in an urgent bid to maintain relevance and power.

“Our party has clung to the status quo, insisted on using the same old playbook, and isn’t fighting hard enough,” he said.

It will not be the first time Mr. Markey has faced a call to step aside for a new generation. In 2020, he defeated a primary challenge from then-Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III, who was 39 at the time, by promoting his progressive bona fides, including his partnership with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, to craft the Green New Deal.

“It’s not your age that counts,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in a 2020 campaign ad for Mr. Markey. “It’s the age of your ideas.”

Mr. Markey’s unexpected victory was a rare defeat for a member of the Kennedy family in Massachusetts and a startling demonstration of the senator’s survival skills. Some of his youthful supporters, who became known as the Markeyverse, criticized what they called ageism in Mr. Kennedy’s campaign.

Four years later, Mr. Moulton’s announcement comes at a starkly different moment, with Democrats still deeply shaken by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s abrupt withdrawal from last year’s race amid concerns about his age, and the subsequent election of President Trump.

Mr. Markey, who was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1976 and to the Senate in 2013, said last year that he intended to run again. If he is re-elected next year, he will be 86 at the end of his third Senate term.

“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,” Mr. Moulton says in his campaign video. “Even more, 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. Senator Markey’s a good man, but it’s time for a new generation of leadership.”

Mr. Moulton, of Salem, Mass., represents the state’s Sixth District, north of Boston. A Marine Corps veteran who served four tours in the Iraq War, he has earned a reputation for impatience in his decade in Congress. He briefly ran for president in 2020 and tried unsuccessfully to block Representative Nancy Pelosi from becoming speaker of the House after the 2018 election, saying it was time for her to step aside.

He angered some in his party last year with comments about transgender athletes, part of his argument that Democrats had lost support by striving too hard not to cause offense.

“I have two 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,” Mr. Moulton told The New York Times the day after the election last November.

He stood by his remarks during the ensuing controversy and said he had heard from many Democrats who thanked him for broaching a difficult subject that others in their party had too often shied away from.

Mr. Moulton’s campaign video features footage of lobstermen hauling traps and of himself at home making French toast with his children. It also stresses his commitment to the concerns of working people. He pledges to continue his work to address climate change, citing his efforts to expand high-speed rail service as a means of reducing carbon emissions, and to enact a ban on assault weapons.

In anticipation of the challenge, Mr. Markey has already begun announcing endorsements, including that of Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts. It remains to be seen who else might join the race; among the possible contenders is Representative Ayanna S. Pressley, 51, a progressive Democrat who beat a 20-year incumbent in the primary before winning her House seat in 2018.