Seth Moulton’s anti-trans shape-shifting ends in a humiliating blowout in Massachusetts

Rep. Seth Moulton went looking for a promotion and found the exit.Massachusetts Democrats overwhelmingly rejected the congressman’s bid for U.S. Senate on Tuesday, renominating Sen. Ed Markey after a campaign that turned Moulton’s attacks on transgender athletes into a test of whether a Democrat could betray part of the party’s coalition and call it courage.It was not close.Markey received 556,865 votes, or 64.88 percent, compared with Moulton’s 301,372 votes, or 35.12 percent, according to Decision Desk HQ. With 91 percent of the estimated vote reported Wednesday morning, Markey led by 255,493 votes — a nearly 30-point demolition.Related: Seth Moulton’s anti-trans rhetoric comes back to haunt him in Senate debate with Ed MarkeyMoulton, 47, had built his campaign around the proposition that Markey, 80, represented a Democratic Party too old and too comfortable to meet the moment. But the novelty of a politician is not the same as the novelty of their politics. In perhaps the race’s sharpest contrast, the older candidate ran unapologetically in defense of transgender people. The younger one spent much of the campaign explaining why he had not.“Tonight, anti-trans politics lost,” Tyler Hack, executive director of the Christopher Street Project, said after Markey’s victory. “Massachusetts rejected the idea that attacking transgender people is a shortcut to political power.”Moulton’s transformation began after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. The congressman had compiled a long record of supporting LGBTQ+ legislation. Then, as some Democrats searched for a conveniently powerless constituency to blame, Moulton told The New York Times that he did not want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”Related: Pro-trans rival draws cheers after Rep. Seth Moulton booed at Boston No Kings rally The remark borrowed the right’s preferred fiction: that transgender girls are not girls but da