Representative Seth Moulton’s primary challenge to Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey hasn’t attracted as much national attention as the Democratic firefights over Senate nominations in Maine and Michigan. But the Massachusetts contest will also offer important clues about where Democrats go next — particularly whether they can honestly confront their greatest electoral challenges.

On paper, the Massachusetts showdown presents the same ideological contrast as the party’s other left-versus-center face-offs. Following Moulton’s election to the House in 2014, he’s often questioned the party’s liberal orthodoxies, while Markey has been a liberal stalwart since the mid-1970s.

But as Moulton heads into the final months before the Sept. 1 primary, he is downplaying those ideological differences. When we spoke recently in Boston, he told me, “Candidly, we’re pretty aligned on policies. We’re both Massachusetts Democrats. It’s not a difference in policy. It’s a different approach to leadership.”

Moulton’s strategy may be shortchanging both his own prospects and his party’s need for a reckoning over its losses in the Trump era. The road not taken for Moulton is presenting a case to Massachusetts voters that his (largely muted) critique of Democratic orthodoxy offers a better path than Markey’s unalloyed liberalism toward achieving what virtually all Democrats care about most: winning enough elections nationwide to stop President Donald Trump and his allies.

Moulton, who will turn 48 in October, is betting instead on the age contrast with his opponent, who will reach 80 next month. “We can’t afford to wait six more years for new leadership,” Moulton responded when I asked him to summarize his case to voters. “If you can honestly look at the state of the country, the state of the Democratic Party today, and say, ‘Yeah, this is great, let’s continue doing the same old thing,’ then vote for the senator.”

The generational argument comes easily to Moulton. He has always seemed a young man in a hurry. Moulton enlisted in the Marines soon after graduating from Harvard in 2001 and served four tours in Iraq. When he entered politics a few years later, Moulton established a consistent pattern of running, Marine-like, through other Democrats: He won his House seat by ousting a nine-term Democratic incumbent; led a quixotic effort to find an alternative to Nancy Pelosi as speaker when Democrats recaptured the House in 2018; and the next year launched a blink-and-you-missed-it campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. He’s been championing generational change for so long that his window to embody it is closing.

Moulton has reason to hope the case for generational succession will land more powerfully now than it did in 2020, when Markey easily turned aside a primary challenge from Representative Joe Kennedy III centered on the same arguments. For one thing, Markey is now six years older. More important, Joe Biden’s painful decline in office — and its contribution to Trump’s return — has many Democratic activists clamoring to sweep aside the party’s aging leadership.

But many Massachusetts observers think the generational argument alone is unlikely to topple Markey, who still looks and sounds vigorous. And it will be difficult for Moulton to convince voters he will fight MAGA more fiercely than Markey, who began his speech at the recent state party convention by asking twice “Are you ready to fight?” and within a few minutes had called for impeaching Trump.

If there is a path for Moulton, it may be in making the case for Democrats to fight the right not harder, but smarter. And that would require Moulton to rediscover his voice as a constructive critic of his party’s direction.

Immediately after Kamala Harris’ 2024 defeat, Moulton was among the national Democrats who most forcefully argued the party had drifted too far left, especially on immigration and transgender rights. When we spoke, he repeatedly insisted the party must have “a tough conversation” about those questions.

But when I pressed Moulton on what he would contribute to that conversation, he defaulted mostly to standard liberal positions: establishing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, hiring more immigration judges to decide asylum cases faster, implementing nationwide protections to ensure that transgender minors can receive gender-affirming care. He wouldn’t even criticize Markey’s push for a prohibitively expensive single-payer government takeover of the healthcare system that would eliminate private insurance; rather, Moulton improbably insisted it was “only a minor policy difference” that he prefers the creation of a public health insurance option to compete with private insurers.

It’s understandable that Moulton wants to limit his disagreements with the left in a Massachusetts primary dominated by liberals. But his initial instinct after 2024 was sounder.

After Harris’ loss, many Democrats want to tilt toward the center on non-economic issues such as immigration, crime and transgender rights; but almost all are trying to do so quietly, to avoid antagonizing the party’s powerful constituency groups. Back in 2024, Moulton seemed to instinctively understand that the best way to convince voters that a party is genuinely changing is to do so publicly, loudly and with plenty of visible conflict. Bill Clinton proved that point in his winning 1992 presidential campaign when he conspicuously picked fights with the left on welfare, crime and other issues. Clinton’s approach left some bruises within the party — particularly his criticism of Sister Souljah, a Black rap artist, over racially inflammatory remarks — but it also led Democrats back to the White House after they had lost three consecutive presidential landslides during the 1980s.

Any flavor of Democrat can win in Massachusetts. But Moulton has a plausible argument that with a Senate stage, he can help redefine the party in a way that will yield more wins nationally than Markey’s progressive purity. To win in Massachusetts, Moulton likely must convince its diehard Democrats to look beyond the Bay State.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is a CNN analyst and the author or editor of seven books.

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