Can 80-year-old Democrat Ed Markey clinch another US Senate term?

Age on the agenda in Massachusetts but octogenarian leftwinger leads younger rival Seth Moulton in primary poll

Democrats have spent the summer ousting long-serving incumbents in primaries across the country. On Tuesday, Massachusetts voters will decide whether that generational revolt extends to the 80-year-old Ed Markey, whose younger Democratic rival has argued that the incumbent is simply too old to serve another term.

But the Senate primary in this heavily Democratic state flips a central dynamic of previous contests, where youthful progressive insurgents have targeted – and in several cases, toppled – older incumbents they derided as avatars of an outmoded cautious establishment.

In something of a role reversal, it is the long-serving Markey who is positioned as the voice of the progressive left, while 47-year-old Seth Moulton, a member of the House of Representatives, has moved some of his more moderate positions closer to those of his older rival in an effort to win over a younger voting cohort.

Polls indicate that Markey – who was first elected to Congress in 1976, before Moulton was born – is poised to confound concerns over his age by winning election for a third full term, at the end of which he would be 86.

Markey’s leftwing credentials have been burnished by endorsements from other high-profile progressives, including Bernie Sanders, the leftwing independent senator from Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren, his fellow Massachusetts senator.

In a recent televised debate , Markey, who became a senator in a 2013 special election to replace John Kerry, when he resigned to become US secretary of state, attempted to tackle the age issue head on.

“I think everyone watching this debate can see that I’m more energized than I’ve ever been before in my life. I am criss-crossing the state. I’m fighting for families,” the senator said.

“Congressman Moulton has a hard time keeping up with me in the course of this campaign.”

Moulton – a former marine who later ran a private health company after military service in Iraq – called for age limits to serve in Congress and contrasted Markey’s campaign performance with his own.

“I’ve done over 50 town halls. You’ve done a couple,” he told Markey. “You’ve missed three candidate forums just in the past week. It’s a lot of work to represent this entire state.”

But it was when the debate turned to technology and the candidates’ personal use of artificial intelligence that the age question appeared to sharpen. Asked whether the senator used AI platforms like ChatGPT in his work, Markey replied that he uses “whatever is inside of my iPhone and my iPad – whatever comes up”.

Moulton seized on that response as evidence that the incumbent did not fully understand the latest technology and how it was poised to transform every sector of society.

“Senator,” he said, “if you don’t even know what you’re using on your phone or your iPad, this is why we need a new generation of leaders to regulate these technologies to make sure that they are safe.”

Moulton, who entered the House of Representatives in 2015, has embraced more moderate positions than Markey, namely on healthcare – on which he stopped short of advocating the single-payer system advocated by his opponent – and on transgender athletes. He apologized at a recent debate for previously saying in the fallout of Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump in 2024 that he did not want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete”.

He has said he would not vote for the Democrats’ current leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, if elected. Schumer, 75, has been portrayed as a symbol of what critics say is an out-of-touch and ageing establishment leadership that has left younger and left-leaning voters disenchanted.

In blue Massachusetts, the Democratic primary often decides who wins office.

An Emerson College Polling survey released on Sunday, suggested voters are willing to look past Markey’s age. In the survey, Markey led Moulton 60% to 33%, a dramatic increase from its May poll, when the senator held a five-point edge over the congressman.

“If these numbers hold, this race will mirror Markey’s successful ‘peak-late’ approach to winning in 2020,” Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said, referring to the senator’s defeat of then congressman Joe Kennedy III, a scion of the state’s best known political dynasty.

Despite Kennedy’s youth – he was 39 at the time – young progressives rallied behind Markey, painting the incumbent as the leader most willing to take on the party’s establishment.

Markey’s re-election would contradict the trend of a growing backlash against elderly leaders that critics have labelled a gerontocracy.

Joe Biden was forced to drop his presidential re-election bid in 2024 amid concerns over his mental acuity after a disastrous presidential election debate in Atlanta against Donald Trump.

Trump, who won the subsequent election against Biden’s replacement, Kamala Harris, is himself 80 and has been the subject of increasing age-related concerns about his health and ability to serve.

Mitch McConnell, 84, the former Republican Senate majority leader, has been absent from Congress for months following a fall and hospitalization that has fueled fevered speculation about his health.

On the campaign trail, Markey sought to cast his age as experience. “I’ve been standing up to the bosses for a long time, so I know no one gives it to you,” he says in one of his most prominent ads, featuring Warren and Sanders. “We have to fight for it.”