Seth Moulton

Here’s a paradox for you: In overwhelming numbers, voters keep telling pollsters that they want upper age limits and term limits for members of Congress. At the same time, they keep voting to reelect long-serving lawmakers who are in their 70s and 80s.

Massachusetts offers the latest evidence. Older incumbents of all ideological stripes swept the state’s Democratic primaries Tuesday night. In the race for U.S. Senate, two-term Sen. Ed Markey, an 80-year-old progressive, easily dispatched the more moderate Rep. Seth Moulton, 47. Elsewhere, Reps. Richard Neal and Stephen Lynch, who are both in their 70s and have collectively been in office for more than six decades, fended off younger and leftier challengers.

So what’s really going on? Here are a few theories.

Ideology Over Age

As the saying goes, age is but a number. Yet voters keep telling us it’s actually a lot more than that. At first glance, Markey’s win would seem to break a recent streak of older incumbents falling to more youthful candidates. So far this year, the losers include Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York (71), Rep. Shri Thanedar of Michigan (71), and Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado (69). But Markey’s victory also fits a different pattern: In all three of those earlier races, the elder lawmaker lost to a more outspokenly progressive rival. And for Massachusetts Democrats contemplating who they wanted as their next senator, ideology was clearly more important than age.

When Moulton launched his campaign, he downplayed any real policy differences with Markey. “Sen. Markey is a good man, but it’s time for a new generation of leadership,” he said in his announcement video. Markey, though, hammered the issues where they did diverge—including the debate over transgender rights. After Kamala Harris lost in 2024, a defeat some Democrats attributed in part to a viral pro-Trump ad that argued “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” Moulton expressed opposition to trans athletes playing in women’s sports. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” he told the New York Times.

Moulton later retreated from those remarks (“I’m sorry if my comments hurt you,” he told the trans community last month), but Markey sought to make them stick. “Trans rights are human rights,” the senator said recently. In a preelection poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, two-thirds of likely Democratic primary voters said they were less likely to support a candidate who had opposed trans rights, and about the same share said they trusted Markey to better represent them on the issues they cared about. So, going forward, it’s probably better to think of age as a factor, but rarely the factor, in how voters approach candidates.

The Power of Incumbency

Moulton’s drubbing has some progressives crowing that new ideas, not just fresh faces, are what Democrats need to compete. How, then, to explain the survival of Neal and Lynch, two longtime members of Congress who put down progressive challenges from first-time candidates last night?

One answer is straightforward: Politicians who seek reelection almost always win. Nationwide, 95 percent of all incumbents reclaimed their seats in 2024. Journalists have showered ink on the anti-establishment fervor that’s supposedly sweeping the Democratic Party, buoyed by voters furious over its longtime leaders’ failure to prevent Donald Trump’s return. But even in that treacherous environment, only seven sitting House Democrats, a tiny fraction of those running for reelection, have lost renomination so far this year. Lynch and Neal both won relatively narrowly, which may suggest some frustration with their extensive tenures or more centrist records (or both). But there’s clearly a risk of overstating Democrats’ unhappiness with their party’s old guard—and of mapping that anger too neatly onto ideology.

Health, Not Age

Polling is an imperfect instrument, and asking voters whether they favor a given candidate or policy doesn’t always tell you why they feel the way they do. So another possible explanation for the apparent paradox over older politicians is that age, at least by itself, isn’t really what voters are worried about. The better term for what’s on their minds may instead be health, both cognitive and physical.

The clearest example is what happened last month, when Rep. John Larson, a 78-year-old Democrat who has represented Connecticut since 1999, lost his primary to a younger challenger. But Larson wasn’t just old and established. He had a complex partial seizure while delivering an on-camera speech on the House floor last year, stopping midsentence before continuing to speak in a slow and halting voice for more than 30 seconds. Larson’s office later attributed the seizure to a congenital heart issue, adding that he’d been prescribed medication to help. But it’s not all that shocking that voters declined to return him to Congress, opting instead for a 47-year-old former mayor who campaigned on generational change.

The health-over-age dynamic may also explain Markey’s resilience. As even some of Moulton’s supporters acknowledged, the 80-year-old senator still looks spry and sounds with it. (After a recent rally, Markey’s campaign blasted out video of the senator shooting hoops.) Markey would be 86 at the end of his next term, the same age Joe Biden would’ve been had he won and finished a second term, but voters evidently saw them differently. In a Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll last month, only a third of Massachusetts primary voters said Markey’s age made them less inclined to support him. When Biden launched his reelection bid, on the other hand, even most Democrats told pollsters he was too old for another term. They may have been alarmed less by the year on Biden’s birth certificate than by his apparent physical frailty, his softening voice, and questions about his mental acuity.

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