Markey trounces Moulton in Massachusetts Senate primary poll

Seth Moulton spent months positioning himself as the guy who'd say the quiet part out loud on trans athletes and border security, the moderate Democrat who could win back voters his party keeps losing. Turns out Massachusetts primary voters weren't buying what he was selling. Sixty percent for an 79-year-old incumbent who's been in Washington since Watergate isn't a race, it's a formality.

This tells you something useful about the actual state of the Democratic Party, as opposed to the version pundits keep writing think pieces about. Every few months some columnist discovers a "moderate lane" opening up and anoints whichever House Democrat sounds vaguely reasonable on cable news. Moulton fit the profile. He criticized his own party on a couple of hot-button issues, got some favorable press for his supposed courage, and then got buried by a primary electorate that apparently wanted none of it. Markey isn't some centrist consensus pick either. He's a Green New Deal true believer who's been getting more progressive with age, not less.

What that says is the moderate revival everyone keeps predicting isn't coming from the primary base. It's a media narrative, not a voter movement. Massachusetts Democrats had a chance to send a message about where their party should go and they sent the opposite one: stay put, keep the incumbent, ignore the guy trying to triangulate.

For Republicans watching from outside, there's a lesson buried here too. The Democratic coalition isn't nearly as fractured or persuadable as some of our own strategists like to assume when they dream about peeling off moderate suburban Democrats. The base is the base. It rewards loyalty and ideology over the kind of split-the-difference politics Moulton was banking on, and it did so by a landslide.