After last night

Incumbent Democrat Senator Ed Markey, age 80, crushed upstart Sixth District Rep. Seth Moulton in yesterday’s Massachusetts primary by 30 points: 65 percent to 35 percent. What happened? Moulton molted, shedding his skin to make room for the new growth of all the requisite Democrat shibboleths of the day, but it availed him naught.

Ira Stoll analyzes the outcome of the race for the Free Beacon in “Abandoning Core Beliefs Fails To Save Seth Moulton From Humiliating Loss.” However, “core beliefs” is probably an overstatement. As he observes more guardedly in his story, “Most of all, though, it is a demonstration that totally abandoning whatever principles you had, or were pretending to have, is no recipe for victory.”

To take one example:

Moulton started out pro-Israel. On October 7, 2023, he said, “I stand firmly with Israel and unequivocally affirm its right to defend itself and its people.” He called the Harvard student organization letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the violence “intellectually weak and morally repugnant,” declaring, “I cannot recall a moment when I’ve been more embarrassed by my alma mater.” In December 2023, he criticized Harvard’s then-president, Claudine Gay: “Moral leadership rarely comes in the form of defensive explanations. People are ‘confused’ because you refused to unequivocally state that advocating genocide has no place in the Harvard community. … Wouldn’t it have been powerful to see university leaders join together in committing to combat the shocking rise of antisemitism in America, rather than uniting to avoid answering a simple question.”

Yet Moulton kicked off his Senate campaign with an attack on the main pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, performatively refusing to accept donations from it. He also pledged to return all the money he had accepted from AIPAC, which he failed to do. Instead, he returned the funds he’d received from the group in the 2026 cycle.

As for Markey, been there, done that. Indeed, Markey sold himself as “The voice of Massachuetts youth.” You know, like the youth at MIT. I should probably add the youthful “LOL” as my own comment on this race.

In the race for Moulton’s congressional seat, former Biden White House aide Dan Koh defeated a multicandidate field. According to Politico, Koh was “one of the few Democrats on the campaign trail this cycle who explicitly embraced the former president. Koh ran hard on endorsements from both former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, featuring the pair in a campaign ad at a time when most Democratic candidates are keeping their distance from the last administration…” The Boston Globe supported one of Koh’s opponents, as did Rep. Ayanna Presley, so there might be a silver lining in this particular cloud.