Former Biden official wins primary for open Moulton House seat in Massachusetts

Daniel Koh beat back a progressive challenger to win the Democratic primary in Massachusetts' 6th, and the headline writes itself: another Biden administration alum heading to Washington to do more of the same. Koh worked in the Biden White House. Before that he was chief of staff to a Boston mayor. This is not a fresh face. This is the machine picking its next cog, and the voters of Essex and Middlesex counties went along with it over a state legislator running to Koh's left.

What's actually interesting here isn't Koh himself, it's what his win says about where the Massachusetts Democratic base still is. Tram Nguyen ran as the progressive alternative, the kind of candidate national Democrats keep telling themselves is the future of the party. She lost. In a deep-blue seat with no Republican prayer in November, primary voters had a real choice between "more Biden-world credentialism" and "further left," and they picked the credentialed insider. That tells you something about how little appetite even blue-state Democrats have for reinventing their bench right now.

Seth Moulton, for all his flaws, occasionally broke from party orthodoxy on things like transgender athletes and Afghanistan withdrawal, which made him a minor irritant to his own leadership. Koh gives every indication of being a much more reliable vote for whatever Hakeem Jeffries wants. Massachusetts will send another safe Democrat to a safe seat, and nothing about how this seat is represented is likely to change in any way that matters to the rest of the country. That's the real story buried in this primary result: the Democratic Party's coastal strongholds aren't looking for new ideas, they're looking for continuity with a familiar face attached.