Massachusetts progressive and Israel critic Markey expected to rout centrist challenger
Times of Israel · LC · trust 43/100
JTA — Massachusetts incumbent and Israel critic Sen. Ed Markey, 80, is expected to handily fend off the more moderate 47-year-old Rep. Seth Moulton on Tuesday, in the state’s Democratic Senate primary.
Although polls project that Markey, a progressive stalwart, will retain his seat, this race began as a neck-and-neck battle between the old and new guard. Yet in contrast to many recent primaries, the junior candidate in this case is the more centrist of the two.
If current numbers hold, Markey could go from leading Moulton by just single digits two months ago to trouncing him by 30 percentage points. The incumbent recently “ opened a large lead ,” with the University of New Hampshire’s Bay State Poll projecting a 63% to 28% victory. That’s a dramatic shift from June , when the survey estimated a 41% to 35% margin. Since then, according to Bay State, Moulton lost moderate support while Markey consolidated socialist and progressive backing.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst offered similar predictions , placing Markey far ahead of his competitor, 60% to 32%. Emerson College Polling, meanwhile, showed a comparable lead for Markey, with the incumbent at 60% and Moulton at 33%.
“At the end of the day, one of the reasons for Moulton’s flame-out is that he had no case to make other than ‘I’m younger than Ed Markey,’” Jeff Robbins, a Boston-based attorney and former Senate investigative counsel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“He wasn’t able to obscure that very well,” added Robbins, who also served as delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission under former US president Bill Clinton. He also began organizing rallies in support of Israel in 2012, during his time serving as chairman of the New England Board of the Anti-Defamation League.
Markey began serving in the US House of Representatives 50 years ago, and stayed in that role until he was elected to the Senate in 2013. During his time in the House, he was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and in the Senate, he has voted for multiple resolutions aimed at cutting military aid and munitions sales to Israel.
Moulton, meanwhile, was born two years after Markey arrived on Capitol Hill. He has been serving in the US House since 2015 and has been critical of both the Democratic socialist agenda and the aging establishment, instead calling for “new energy, new ideas and leaders willing to put people over politics.”
He established the Serve America PAC in 2017 to support the campaigns of “military veterans, other service-driven candidates and next generation leaders” in the 2020 election cycle. The Boston Globe recently threw its support behind Moulton, calling for “new vision and vigor” in “an aging, ailing and deeply unpopular Democratic Party.”
Yet a recent New York Times piece described Moulton as a “rebel without a cause,” who has “tried to drift where he thinks the political winds are blowing.” One such drift relates to his breakup with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last October, when he announced that he would be “returning AIPAC donations and refusing to accept any donations or support from them.”
“In recent years AIPAC has aligned itself too closely with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government,” Moulton said. “I’m a friend of Israel, but not of its current government.”
Track AIPAC, a group that documents political spending by pro-Israel lobbies, declared in response that “returning AIPAC’s blood money is better late than never.” The group demanded that Moulton call the war in Gaza a genocide and “stop writing blank checks” to Israel’s “tyrannical regime.”
Citing Federal Election Commission records, Track AIPAC found that pro-Israel PACs have spent about $101,500 on Moulton over his career — a relatively modest amount for a six-term congressman.
“It is clearly the safe thing to do, if you are running for a nomination in the Democratic Party, to aggressively distance yourself from Israel,” said Robbins.
He described the situation as “reflective of the reality that we have seen play out in spades over the last year,” in which Democratic candidates are “running for the hills about AIPAC and treating it as a boogeyman.”
Not only was Moulton’s decision insufficient to recruit AIPAC detractors to his campaign, but it also rattled many members of the Jewish community.
Political scientist Samuel Abrams at the time described the decision as “the moment when an ambitious, mainstream Democrat concluded that distancing himself from the organized Jewish community is a political asset, not a liability.”
“In today’s Democratic ecosystem, the act of rejecting traditional Jewish institutions has become a badge of progressive credibility,” wrote Abrams, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right public policy think tank.
David Frum, a writer for The Atlantic and former speechwriter for former president George W. Bush, suggested that Moulton was “opening the door *just a little* to anti-Jewish feeling,” In other words, Moulton would seek to win his primary by borrowing some “Mamdani energy,” Frum added, referring to the popular progressive mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani.
“If you want to have a prayer of being elected in a Democratic primary in this country, you had better be able to say, ‘I don’t take money from AIPAC. In fact, I never heard of it before,’” Robbins said.
But he stressed Moulton’s 30-point lag in the polls has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with his opponent’s political shrewdness and refusal to allow anyone “to run to the left of him.”
Markey is not new to staving off a younger, center-left candidate. In 2020, at 74, he defeated the then-39-year-old Rep. Joe Kennedy III — marking the first loss for a Kennedy in a Massachusetts election, according to the Cook Political Report.
If the current polls prove accurate, Tuesday’s race could “mirror Markey’s successful ‘peak-late’ approach to winning in 2020,” Spencer Kimball,…
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