The sun was hot. The crowd had thinned. The ceremonial shovels, their duty done, rested in ceremonial dirt.

And Sen. Ed Markey, 80, needed a quick favor from two other Massachusetts Democrats as they celebrated the opening of an industrial campus in Worcester: Would they join him for a selfie video?

“We’re at the groundbreaking! For GreenTech Park! Here in Worcester!” Markey said into the phone, treading lightly on the R in “park” and practically levitating off the pockmarked road as Rep. Jim McGovern and Mayor Joseph Petty of Worcester, both 66, squeezed into the frame. “It’s the dawn of a new era!”

That was yesterday. By this morning, that selfie video had been packaged into a Instagram reel that also showed Markey bounding through an awards ceremony and into the local minor league baseball stadium that night — a daily display of vim from an octogenarian who insists he has the vigor for another six-year term.

Markey’s challenge: Across the country, Democratic voters are eagerly swapping aging lawmakers for younger challengers. After Rep. John Larson, 78, of Connecticut, lost his race for a 15th term to former Mayor Luke Bronin, 47, of Hartford this week, I drove up to Worcester to see how Markey, the oldest Senate Democrat running for reelection, is trying to defy that trend.

His approach: Markey is facing a challenge from Rep. Seth Moulton, a 47-year-old moderate. Markey has seized on the ideological dimensions of the race, running on his progressive bona fides with a similar playbook to the one that helped him beat former Rep. Joe Kennedy III in 2020. He might also be betting that a willingness to be seen pounding the pavement — and his support from young voters — will help him seem more Bernie than Biden.

“I always think of myself as the youngest guy in the room,” he told me yesterday, “when it comes to ideas.”

Half a Century in Office

At Polar Park, the AAA baseball stadium for the Red Sox feeder team that Massachusetts wrested from Rhode Island in the late 2010s, he greeted local dignitaries (the 31-year-old mayor of Gardner, Massachusetts! The owner of Sullivan Tire!) like celebrities.

Then he and McGovern slipped into the broadcasting booth, where Markey spouted off trivia about the most promising players on the team.

“Honestly,” he said as a player named Franklin Arias stepped to the plate, “we’re seeing the growth of the new Mookie Betts.”

As he walked through the stadium, he paused to take in a display of team programs going all the way back to 1973 — the year that Markey first took office in the Massachusetts state House. (He was elected to Congress three years later, and served there until he was elected to the Senate in a special election in 2013.)

Moulton, a six-term congressman from Massachusetts’ North Shore, has made Markey’s status as a long-term fixture of Washington the central point of his campaign.

“People ought to ask, ‘What are you going to accomplish in the next six years that you haven’t been able to accomplish in the last 50?’” Moulton said at a debate in July.

Moving ‘Where the Next Generation Is’

Polling on the race is fairly scant. A University of New Hampshire poll from June showed Markey leading Moulton by 6 percentage points; worryingly for Markey, though, Moulton had increased his support by 12 points since February, while nearly a quarter of respondents remained undecided.

Markey has portrayed Moulton as being too moderate for Massachusetts, criticizing him for not supporting “Medicare for All” and for picking a fight with his party about transgender rights after the 2024 election. Markey’s betting that the age argument doesn’t work if a younger candidate isn’t seen as sufficiently liberal.

“Whether it’s Minnesota with Peggy Flanagan, or Michigan with Abdul El-Sayed, or here in Massachusetts, it’s progressives versus moderates, and the progressives are winning,” Markey said.

The argument has worked once before. It carried Markey to victory over Kennedy — particularly after the senator drew hordes of young volunteers, a group that called themselves the Markeyverse, to his campaign. Some of those volunteers are on his staff today, cutting his videos and increasing his TikTok following.

“You have to move to where the next generation is. You have to go to them,” Markey said at the baseball park, as the sun set and the sound of a hit crackled in the air.

He has promised to make way for the next generation if he wins in November; he said after the July debate that he would step down after one more term, when he will be 86.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Jess Bidgood/Mel Musto

c.2026 The New York Times Company