Sen. Ed Markey won the Massachusetts Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday, defeating Rep. Seth Moulton, according to projections by NBC News and The Associated Press.
In early returns, Markey held roughly 70 percent of the vote to Moulton’s 30 percent, according to NBC News and Bloomberg.
Markey, 80, turned back a challenge built almost entirely around his age. Moulton, 47, a former Marine first elected to the House in 2014, had argued that the Democratic Party was stuck in the “status quo” and that it was time for a new generation of leadership. The argument, which unseated some long-serving Democrats in primaries elsewhere this year, did not land in heavily Democratic Massachusetts. Because the state leans strongly Democratic, Markey is now favored to win a third full term in the November general election, where he faces the Republican nominee, John Deaton.
Markey, a progressive who champions single-payer health care and the Green New Deal, was endorsed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He cast Moulton’s more moderate positions as the real break with the state’s voters, and shortly before the primary, Moulton apologized for remarks he had made about transgender athletes.
A Consistent Ally on Haitian TPS
The outcome keeps in office a senator who has been among the most active in Congress on behalf of Haitian immigrants facing the end of Temporary Protected Status.
Over the past year, Markey repeatedly used his Senate seat to try to preserve those protections.
In June, Markey and Delaware Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester, joined by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and more than a dozen colleagues, introduced legislation to designate Haiti for TPS, an effort to lock in deportation protections for more than 350,000 Haitians. “It’s not safe for Haitians to return to Haiti,” Markey told CTN, arguing that if Washington warns its own citizens against traveling there, it would be “inhumane” to send Haitians back.
After the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Haiti’s TPS in its June ruling, Markey and Blunt Rochester forced a vote on the Senate floor on July 22 to pass a House-approved bill designating Haiti for TPS; Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri blocked it. “I will not stop in my fight to protect the Haitian TPS community,” Markey said afterward. When a lower court formally confirmed the termination in August, he called it a “moral failure.”
His office also said he helped lead 26 senators and 157 representatives in April in filing a friend-of-the-court brief in Miot v. Trump, the case challenging the termination, and that he released a report in May with Warren and Rep. Ayanna Pressley on how ending Haitian TPS would strain the state’s health care and elder-care workforce.
The Stakes for the Community
The timing is consequential for Haitians in Massachusetts and nationwide. TPS ended for roughly 350,000 Haitians after the Supreme Court’s decision in Mullin v. Doe, and the Trump administration has begun carrying out deportation flights to Haiti, which land in Cap-Haïtien because the capital’s airport is considered too dangerous. The State Department warns Americans against all travel to Haiti, citing kidnapping, crime, and unrest, and the United Nations estimates gang violence has displaced roughly 1.5 million people. Massachusetts is home to one of the country’s larger Haitian populations, concentrated in the Boston area.
The Department of Homeland Security has defended the terminations, with a spokesperson telling reporters that TPS was never intended to be “a de facto amnesty.”
The race largely turned on Markey’s age and tenure. Moulton, who was born after Markey was first elected to Congress in 1976, tied his campaign to the anxieties that followed President Joe Biden’s troubled 2024 re-election bid and eventual exit from that race. At an August debate, Markey said he was “more energized” than ever, while Moulton seized on a moment when the senator, asked which artificial-intelligence tools he used, referred only to whatever appeared on his phone and tablet.
Markey has been a fixture in Massachusetts politics for five decades, serving in the House from 1976 and in the Senate since 2013. In 2020, he fended off a primary challenge from then-Rep. Joe Kennedy III. With Tuesday’s win, he heads into a November general election in which, given the state’s strong Democratic lean, he enters as the favorite.
https://ctninfo.com/ed-markey-wins-m…ing-seth-moulton/
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