DORCHESTER, Mass. — Tyler Hack is 21 years old. On Saturday, she attended a rally for a senator nearly four times her age and explained why the incumbent’s 47-year-old challenger had it wrong.

“We don’t want younger politicians with older politics,” Hack, the founder of the Christopher Project, a youth advocacy group, said at a rally here on Saturday for Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass.

Democrats have spent two years arguing about the age of their leaders and about where the value of experience ends and the case for generational change begins. Rep. Seth Moulton has built his Senate primary challenge to Markey around that argument: that the incumbent and a party led for years by aging politicians are overdue for new leadership. Moulton, who has called for congressional term limits, has cast himself as part of a generation ready to take over. 

It is an argument the last two years were supposed to have made easy.

“A lot of people, if you ask them, ‘Does age matter?’ They’ll say ‘No,’” Moulton told MS NOW on Saturday at a campaign stop at Memo’s Restaurant in West Springfield. “Then you tell them that he’s 80 years old, and they’re like, ‘Wow.’ Biden, Feinstein, Ruth Bader Ginsburg … Now, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell on the other side of the aisle.”

But the voters who might be expected to embrace that case most enthusiastically are the ones complicating it.

The College Democrats of Massachusetts endorsed Markey overwhelmingly, saying Moulton was out of step with its members on healthcare, climate, Gaza and transgender rights. The Massachusetts High School Democrats, College Democrats of America, Voters of Tomorrow and the Sunrise Movement have also backed the incumbent.

Empowering young Americans does not require electing the youngest candidates, said Santiago Mayer, Voters of Tomorrow’s executive director. He supports Markey.

“We need to elect the people who will represent young people the best,” Mayer told MS NOW. Markey, he said, has earned that standing by elevating young activists and taking up their priorities.

Markey led Moulton, 63% to 28%, among likely Democratic primary voters in a University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll released Aug. 26. The poll found Markey had consolidated support among progressive and democratic socialist voters and was even with Moulton among moderates. More than half of Moulton’s supporters cited Markey’s age as their main reason for backing the challenger. 

On policy, the two are more alike than their generational clash suggests. Both support abortion rights, stricter gun laws, expanded health coverage and lower housing and everyday costs. That overlap has left age and experience as the race’s clearest dividing line — and made it a purer test of whether the argument works.

Even some Moulton supporters say age alone is not disqualifying, and that stamina and mental fitness matter more than a birth year.

“I feel like if that is your desire to do, and you have the stamina to do it, then go for it,” said Tracy Willingham, who plans to vote for Moulton. “Who am I to say, ‘Oh, because of their age, that they should stop’?”

Markey has been here before. 

Six years ago, he turned what could have been his greatest vulnerability — his decades in Washington — into an unlikely electoral asset. Facing then-Rep. Joe Kennedy III, nearly four decades his junior, Markey captured the enthusiasm of young progressives with his sponsorship of the Green New Deal, an aggressive social media strategy and an image that transformed his battered pair of Nike sneakers into something approaching a campaign symbol. In one of the campaign’s most memorable videos, Markey inverted President John F. Kennedy’s famous call to service: “With all due respect: It’s time to start asking what your country can do for you.”

Markey won that primary powered in part by young progressives — a coalition built partly from the wreckage of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, according to a Democratic strategist who was granted anonymity to discuss the race candidly. Thousands of young activists were looking for somewhere to go, the strategist said, and Markey’s climate record gave them a place to land; pandemic-era organizing turned a Senate primary into a national cause. Markey has held them since by meeting them on TikTok, Twitch, Reddit and Instagram, and by giving them a meaningful role.

For the most part, they’ve stood by him.

“Age is just a number,” said Courtney Foster, a member of the Sunrise Movement. “People are really looking at someone that has the policy vision that can bring things to reality. I think that Ed Markey still has got it.”

Markey underscored that support Saturday, when he campaigned with Sanders and fellow Massachusetts Democrats Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Ayanna Pressley. The lineup highlighted another tension in the Democrats’ age debate: Some of the Senate’s most prominent progressives are among its oldest members. Sanders is 84, Markey is 80 and Warren is 77. All three have spent years arguing that unfinished fights over climate change, healthcare, workers’ rights and economic inequality require them to remain in the arena.

For their supporters, longevity can mean a record of fighting for those priorities rather than evidence that it is time to leave.

“I would rather have somebody with experience that probably is getting to be too old but whose judgment I can trust and whose voting history I can trust, than someone younger who simply is using, basically, ageism as a way to promote sort of a corporate agenda,” said Rob McCarthy, a Democratic Massachusetts voter.

“You have a fundamental choice to make,” Markey told a crowd of supporters on Saturday. “We have to make the choice between a record of results and rebranded ambition … a choice between conviction and convenience.”

Moulton is betting Democrats now see things differently.

He has repeatedly argued that the party needs fresh leadership, making Markey’s age and more than five decades in elected office central to his campaign. The argument carries more political resonance after 2024, when concerns about President Joe Biden’s age and acuity consumed his re-election campaign before he withdrew from the race.

“It’s resonated with a lot of voters,” Moulton told MS NOW. The risk, in his telling, is not age itself but what has happened when aging politicians stayed: “We can’t put progressive priorities at risk.”

Markey has pushed back by arguing that the relevant question is what politicians do with their power. “It’s not your age; it’s the age of your ideas.” He’s also made clear that if re-elected, it would be his final term.

Both men are making a claim about what age signifies. 

“It’s kind of this idea of the old guard as opposed to just old people,” the Democratic strategist told MS NOW. “There is not an easy way to show that age correlates necessarily with ideas.”

The primary therefore poses a more complicated test than whether Democrats are ready for younger leadership: It asks whether age itself is enough to dislodge an incumbent when voters remain broadly satisfied with his politics — and whether the demand for generational change has limits when the older politician is still aligned with the party’s youngest voters.

Markey was perhaps the last major Democratic incumbent to benefit from the “cool grandpa” politics that once made Sanders a phenomenon among young progressives. Biden’s 2024 bid helped turn age from a political curiosity into a source of open anxiety for Democrats.

But Massachusetts could suggest that voters have not adopted a blanket rule.

If Markey wins another primary against a challenger decades his junior — and does it with young Democrats firmly in his coalition — the result would not end the party’s generational reckoning. But it could instead sharpen it: Democratic voters may be asking less about the date on a politician’s birth certificate than whether the person asking them to move on has given them a compelling reason to do so.

“I would love to have a younger senator, but I don’t think Seth Moulton is the person,” Tom Vosganian, a 20-year-old Markey supporter, told MS NOW. “I don’t think he represents the values of my generation.”

The post He’s 47 and running on age. Many young Democrats back the 80-year-old. appeared first on MS NOW.

From MS Now.