Markey, 80, Outlasts the 'New Leadership' Movement, 80–47

BOSTON — In a result that should have been impossible and was, nonetheless, possible, Senator Ed Markey, 80, has won his party’s Senate nomination in Massachusetts and will, per the calendar, run for a third term this fall. His opponent, Representative Seth Moulton, 47, had campaigned for months on the slogan that the party “needed new leaders,” and he has, by the numbers, just lost by 33 years.

The math is the story. Markey is now 80. Moulton is 47. The difference is 33 years, which is older than the United States was when it won the war that is, as a matter of tradition, the one Americans remember. Markey has served, in various capacities, for longer than Moulton has been a politician, a fact that the Moulton campaign did not, in the final stretch, appear to have a response to.

What makes the result notable is not that the incumbent won. Incumbents win Senate primaries the way it rains in April — not because anyone asked, but because the season is doing its thing. What makes it notable is the slogan. “New leadership” is the phrase that has, for the better part of a decade, done the work of describing American politics the way a thermometer describes a fever: accurately, and with the implication that something is, in fact, wrong. Moulton ran on new leadership. The convention, in other words, voted for the old leadership, and did so in a state that has, for decades, been described as a kind of laboratory for exactly the kind of change Moulton was selling.

The age gap has a history. Markey is one of the oldest members of the Senate, and the Senate, as a body, has in recent years become a kind of long-term care facility with a legislative budget. The average age of the chamber is up. The average age of the ambition to replace it is, correspondingly, down. Moulton, at 47, was not, in the scheme of things, the new thing. He was, by the standard his own campaign set, the previous thing. He was the new leadership, but he was not new enough.

The quote does the work of the whole campaign in one sentence. Experience, knowledge, temperament. These are the three virtues that, in American politics, are the ones that scale with age. The younger you are, the less you have, in the arithmetic of the virtues, and the older you are, the more you have, and the more you have, the less the question of whether you should keep having them comes up. Moulton could have objected that the country is, by any measure, in a worse state than it was 33 years ago, when Markey was 47, and Markey would have been able to respond, accurately, that he has been in the country for the entire duration of that deterioration, and has, in that time, not once left.

The practical effect of the result is that Massachusetts will, this fall, send to the Senate a man who is, by the standard he himself applied in the campaign, exactly what his opponent said it needed to stop being. This is not a contradiction in the result. It is the result.

The Moulton campaign, in the hours after the result, issued a statement that described the loss as “a reminder that the American people understand the importance of experience,” which is a sentence that, if it were a political position, would have won the primary. The statement did not, in the end, contest the arithmetic. It did not, in the end, have to. The arithmetic had already been done. The answer was 80.

At press time, a Markey aide confirmed the senator was “honored to be chosen once again by the people of Massachusetts,” and declined to say whether, at 80, the senator had a plan for the next eight years. The plan, per the aide, was the same plan he had for the last two terms, which was, per the record, to keep serving.