Massachusetts 2026 Congressional elections

[MrDee12345]

I, too, think it's really bad that our federal government is mostly a gerontocracy at this point.

I also think it's a kind of a bad prejudice to not want someone in office just because they're old.

There are specific problems that could make older people bad representatives, and it's probably best to consider those: Cognitive decline is a big worry. Or losing general stamina to do the work. Or health problems keeping them from work. Or losing touch with the problems of younger generations. Or getting complacent in DC. Or losing touch with actual constituents back home. Or clinging to outdated ideas and policies. In some cases when an elected official dies, their seat might go to someone in the other party. (Anyone have any other suggestions?) We can all think of old politicians these have been huge problems for.

Considering those specific possible problems, I think Markey is doing fine. Some of those problems might even apply to him, to some degree. But he seems with it, he keeps seriously working with the Millennials in Congress, he doesn't seem to have gotten complacent. If he dies, I don't worry a Republican will take his seat. And I don't think there's anything about Moulton's youth that makes him obviously better.

But I'm sure other people here know more about Markey than I do. Maybe I'm missing something. But his age doesn't bother me. (And all the same goes for Warren, too, age 76.)

I guess I've seen far too many cases lately where our representatives (from the President down to the House) have clearly passed an age where they can effectively represent their constituents. I realize that Markey could still have many good years left in him - hell, Malaysia elected a 90+ year old PM back in 2018 and he was sharp as a tack. Corrupt, but sharp.

Still, there are plenty of younger people with something to give to their country and the old generation doesn't seem willing to move aside and let some new ideas in.

 

[MrDee12345]

I thought Moulton’s had a bad record lately when it comes to trans rights. A brief skim of his wiki article said he supported republicans trying to limit racism being discussed in schools.

I’m all for someone taking Markey’s place but it needs to be someone with at least similar levels of integrity.

Edit: I guess a sense or prejudice I have as a younger millennial or older gen z (born in ‘96) is that there seem to be very few actual liberals among gen x. It seems like many in that age group who purport to care about workers, women, and immigrants can’t shake a deep-seated belief that trickle-down economics and patriotism are the most important things to secure a bright future for everyone. Like whenever there’s a crack in the facade it becomes clear that they don’t really support like 40% of the things they say they do.

I wouldn't say he has a "bad record." He just expressed the very popular view that he's not comfortable with trans girls playing sports with biological girls. Hardly earth-shattering. He wasn't attacking the entire community, and he actually does have a good record for supporting LGBTQ veterans.

As a gen x myself (born in 78), despite my push for younger talent in government, I often find myself frustrated with certain segments of your generation and the lack of nuance in very complicated issues. The issue of immigrants and immigration comes up a lot as one of those issues, as I find that issue, and the poor liberal response to it, pushed a lot of people to the right. Even as recently as Obama's Presidency, liberals understood immigration was good, and that we needed to find ways to curb illegal immigration.

Now, it's hard to find a single Democrat who is even willing to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants (looking at you Wu and Mamdani). It's frustrating to me as the husband of a non-American, non-white, not Christian woman (she's not an immigrant now because I live in her country, Malaysia, so I'm actually the immigrant here), and how this might affect her should we move back to the US. This is a good article that I think I've posted before, but it holds now: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazin...frum-how-much-immigration-is-too-much/583252/

And there are several issues like this that I could name, but you get my point.

And let me be clear, that doesn't excuse the vile behavior of MAGA and their leader, but we also have to recognize issues that Democrats take that turn people off. As I posted earlier in this thread, Trump got 3 million more votes in 2024 than in 2020, and Harris got 6 million fewer votes in 2024 than Biden did in 2020. We can't ignore that if we want better leadership coming from the left.

 

[393b40]

I wouldn't say he has a "bad record." He just expressed the very popular view that he's not comfortable with trans girls playing sports with biological girls. Hardly earth-shattering. He wasn't attacking the entire community, and he actually does have a good record for supporting LGBTQ veterans.

As a gen x myself (born in 78), despite my push for younger talent in government, I often find myself frustrated with certain segments of your generation and the lack of nuance in very complicated issues. The issue of immigrants and immigration comes up a lot as one of those issues, as I find that issue, and the poor liberal response to it, pushed a lot of people to the right. Even as recently as Obama's Presidency, liberals understood immigration was good, and that we needed to find ways to curb illegal immigration.

Now, it's hard to find a single Democrat who is even willing to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants (looking at you Wu and Mamdani). It's frustrating to me as the husband of a non-American, non-white, not Christian woman (she's not an immigrant now because I live in her country, Malaysia, so I'm actually the immigrant here), and how this might affect her should we move back to the US. This is a good article that I think I've posted before, but it holds now: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazin...frum-how-much-immigration-is-too-much/583252/

And there are several issues like this that I could name, but you get my point.

And let me be clear, that doesn't excuse the vile behavior of MAGA and their leader, but we also have to recognize issues that Democrats take that turn people off. As I posted earlier in this thread, Trump got 3 million more votes in 2024 than in 2020, and Harris got 6 million fewer votes in 2024 than Biden did in 2020. We can't ignore that if we want better leadership coming from the left.

Trans women/girls in woman sports such an uncommon issue. Its the wedgiest of wedge issues. The fact there's people dedicating actual energy to this problem sucks because its such a small problem.

The American public loves wedge culture issues so I get it from a political opportunist standpoint.

 

[FormFollowsBudget]

Trans women/girls in woman sports such an uncommon issue. Its the wedgiest of wedge issues. The fact there's people dedicating actual energy to this problem sucks because its such a small problem.

The American public loves wedge culture issues so I get it from a political opportunist standpoint.

Something like 10/500,000 college athletes.. Such a strange topic to hang on to, especially if you think about it for more than 60 seconds, if we're talking about having a nuanced position...

Every time this discussion is brought up we gravitate more toward an environment of fear for all women athletes. With enough legwork from the "very popular side," we'll have a plethora of false allegations to deal with, and soon enough we'll be laying the groundwork for invasive and discriminatory screenings. And once those mechanisms are in place, they carry a real potential for misuse.

 

[MrDee12345]

Trans women/girls in woman sports such an uncommon issue. Its the wedgiest of wedge issues. The fact there's people dedicating actual energy to this problem sucks because its such a small problem.

The American public loves wedge culture issues so I get it from a political opportunist standpoint.

It IS a very minor issue, but Blackbird raised it as a reason not to vote for Moulton.

 

[Longfellow]

If you are wondering why mainstream democrats are talking the way leftists did in 2016 about immigration enforcement, you can thank the President.

 

[KCasiglio]

It IS a very minor issue, but Blackbird raised it as a reason not to vote for Moulton.

Well, yeah. Yet another data point in his history of poor political instincts. I think Platner had a much savvier response in just calling it for what it is:

“I think there are, like, two trans kids that compete in high school sports in Maine,” Platner continued. “There are 40,000 Mainers who are going to lose health care because of the lack of the Affordable Care Act extension. One of those things seems very important and real to me. One of them seems like an invented culture-war scare to keep people divided.” Platner went on to say he had wrestled with cisgender girls as a high school athlete, but “[t]here was no uproar [...] I’m sorry — I cannot take it seriously.”

(source)

 

[Blackbird]

Now, it's hard to find a single Democrat who is even willing to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants (looking at you Wu and Mamdani). It's frustrating to me as the husband of a non-American, non-white, not Christian woman (she's not an immigrant now because I live in her country, Malaysia, so I'm actually the immigrant here), and how this might affect her should we move back to the US. This is a good article that I think I've posted before, but it holds now: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazin...frum-how-much-immigration-is-too-much/583252/

I have marked it as a goal of mine to look more deeply into this, but my impression of the experience my grandparents had coming to the US in the 1920s/30s from Ireland is..

“part 1 - you show up on a boat.
part 2 - claim you have some relative in the area who can vouch for you.
part 3 - welcome to america”.

My impression of the same process in 2026 is..

“part 1 - win the lottery.
part 2 - wait 10 years, act better than a saint, then pass a test where you have to name the 17th president’s favorite breakfast food.
part 3 - show up to your naturalization ceremony and get arrested/deported from there”.

Had a conversation with a man from Houston last summer and we briefly touched on immigration. He said something like “you wouldn’t understand. There are parts [of Houston] where you go and no one can speak English. It’s out of control”. And what struck me was - that feels like nothing new. For over 100 years there have been places in MA where you could go and expect there to be a lack of English speakers. Just before Spanish, it was Polish, Italian, Yiddish, Armenian, French, Portuguese, etc. In the northeast, immigration feels like a heritage in its own right. But the south and (to a lesser extent) parts of the midwest never had that constant funneling of new people until relatively recently. Hence the modern backlash.

My personal opinion is that I have no right to make American residency and citizenship harder for people to obtain now than it was for my parents and grandparents, whatever that was.

I wouldn't say he has a "bad record." He just expressed the very popular view that he's not comfortable with trans girls playing sports with biological girls. Hardly earth-shattering. He wasn't attacking the entire community, and he actually does have a good record for supporting LGBTQ veterans.

It IS a very minor issue, but Blackbird raised it as a reason not to vote for Moulton.

Gender in sports is admittedly complicated. The way I see it, even in very strictly genitalia-segregated sports, you still wind up with different stratifications of competitiveness (AAA, minor, pro, divisions 1-3, etc.) because different people are better at different things. So considering the whole thing as a spectrum or Venn diagram where sex characteristics can be a factor but also mixed in with height, weight, bone structure, and other genetic stuff, there’s probably some untapped potential in there for more coed leagues and play than what we have now. But that’s hard to define and unravel. So (again in my opinion) it makes sense to keep genital separation in at least professional sports, the most competitive college leagues, and any contact sports in lower leagues and grades. If it’s not a contact sport or a truly competitive setting, then who really cares.

All’s that is to say - it’s not sports alone per se that would make me write off Moulton completely. HOWEVER, the current political situation makes me highly worried that it could be a slippery slope from sports to drivers licenses, gun ownership, voting etc. If Moulton isn’t willing to take a hard stance in support of trans rights in general, can I trust him to do it when it really matters?

 

[3decker]

I have marked it as a goal of mine to look more deeply into this, but my impression of the experience my grandparents had coming to the US in the 1920s/30s from Ireland is..

“part 1 - you show up on a boat.
part 2 - claim you have some relative in the area who can vouch for you.
part 3 - welcome to america”.

My impression of the same process in 2026 is..

“part 1 - win the lottery.
part 2 - wait 10 years, act better than a saint, then pass a test where you have to name the 17th president’s favorite breakfast food.
part 3 - show up to your nationalization ceremony and get arrested/deported from there”.

Had a conversation with a man from Houston last summer and we briefly touched on immigration. He said something like “you wouldn’t understand. There are parts [of Houston] where you go and no one can speak English. It’s out of control”. And what struck me was - that feels like nothing new. For over 100 years there have been places in MA where you could go and expect there to be a lack of English speakers. Just before Spanish, it was Polish, Italian, Yiddish, Armenian, French, Portuguese, etc. In the northeast, immigration feels like a heritage in its own right. But the south and (to a lesser extent) parts of the midwest never had that constant funneling of new people until relatively recently. Hence the modern backlash.

My personal opinion is that I have no right to make American residency and citizenship harder for people to obtain now than it was for my parents and grandparents, whatever that was.

I think the difference is that right now in the U.S., we have the highest % foreign-born population that we have ever had in this country, surpassing that of the 1920s and 30s. And that's WITH all the hurdles we've put in place to curb immigration.

I don't know if there's one "correct" maximum percentage for our country's foreign-born population, but it is certainly a conversation we should be having. If there isn't some specific metric or number we can point to as a final goal, every limitation on immigration does seem arbitrary, and then you split people into camps that either support all immigration or denounce all immigration, with no room for a happy medium.

 

[JumboBuc]

Still, there are plenty of younger people with something to give to their country and the old generation doesn't seem willing to move aside and let some new ideas in.

This is the crux of the issue to me. It's not about age, it's about incumbency. The truth of the matter is that for the VAST majority of elected seats in this country, the incumbent always wins. Always. Even if the incumbent is mediocre-to-bad at their job, they'll win against even the best challengers barring a MAJOR scandal. And plenty of lousy incumbents still win even with major scandals.

If the incumbent always wins then winning an election basically ensures a job until death. That leads to an equilibrium where the House and Senate is full of a lot of old people (especially when their eventual replacements have been waiting in line for decades for a seat to "open up").

This is especially true in parties with strong single-party majorities (I'm looking at you, Massachusetts). If you're an incumbent aligned with the Democratic Party, the odds that you'll lose -- let alone even be challenged -- in the next election are close to zero.

In the 2024 election for MA's US Reps:

• Zero of MA's 9 US Reps (all Democrats) faced a primary challenger.
• Only 2 of MA's US Reps faced a Republican challenger.
• 2 of MA's US Reps faced any independent challenger.
• Thus, 5 of MA's US Reps ran for re-election completely unopposed.
• The closest race of the 9 was in District 9, where Keating won 56-43 over a Republican

In the 2024 election for MA's US Senator:

• Warren had no primary challenger.
• Warren won 60-40 over her Republican challenger, materially underperforming the whole slate of incumbent Reps and of Kamala Harris.
  • There were about 100k people who voted Harris for President but not for Warren for Senate.

In 2022, Charlie Baker (a very popular Republican Governor) declined to run for re-election and there was not even a Democratic primary to select his replacement. The voters never had a say on the Democratic side.

At the State level this is even more pronounced. Basically, once you're in the State House or the State Senate you have that job for life (unless you're in one of a very very small number of "swing" districts between parties).

THIS IS NOT HEALTHY FOR DEMOCRACY. Every elected should face real challengers on the electoral calendar and voters should regularly weigh the performance of incumbents against the promise of their challengers (even within the same party) at the ballot box. The environment where even the presence of a primary challenger is newsworthy is not how democracy is supposed to work.

 

[Blackbird]

I think the difference is that right now in the U.S., we have the highest % foreign-born population that we have ever had in this country, surpassing that of the 1920s and 30s. And that's WITH all the hurdles we've put in place to curb immigration.

Do you have a source? If true, I’d imagine they’re getting the number for the whole US by averaging out the eastern cities (and SF) with the south/heartland areas that were probably 98% old English/German/Scots-Irish and African American at the time. Hyper-locally, I have a hard time believing Boston has more foreign born now as a percentage than it did in the 20s/30s.

I don't know if there's one "correct" maximum percentage for our country's foreign-born population, but it is certainly a conversation we should be having. If there isn't some specific metric or number we can point to as a final goal, every limitation on immigration does seem arbitrary, and then you split people into camps that either support all immigration or denounce all immigration, with no room for a happy medium.

You’ll have a hard time determining that number by looking external. We’re supposed to be *the* standard and proof-of-concept for a country that’s built by immigration.

 

[RandomWalk]

Americans have been taught to hate the other and to sort self from others by how they look, sound, worship, or behave. Economic station is a better way of distinguishing between people. However, one can’t easily identify economic status in a casual encounter.

 

[3decker]

Do you have a source? If true, I’d imagine they’re getting the number for the whole US by averaging out the eastern cities (and SF) with the south/heartland areas that were probably 98% old English/German/Scots-Irish and African American at the time. Hyper-locally, I have a hard time believing Boston has more foreign born now as a percentage than it did in the 20s/30s.

Fair point! I was approaching the immigration question from a national lens since that's where any legislation affecting it would come from, but for Boston in particular, NBC is quoting 38% foreign-born in 1850, 29% as of 2021. Wikipedia has Massachusetts at 18% in 2023.

You’ll have a hard time determining that number by looking external. We’re supposed to be *the* standard and proof-of-concept for a country that’s built by immigration.

I don't know about that. I think we can definitely look at other countries as case-studies, albeit not perfect analogs:

(2024 % Foreign-born population) - From Wikipedia
Australia - 30%
New Zealand - 28%
Canada - 23%
UK - 17%
US - 15%

That's a lot of good data from countries similar to the U.S. that have larger foreign-born populations. I don't think it's asking too much to do some unbiased critical analysis of the positive and negative effects of that larger % on the lives of the people in those countries.

While all of this is getting into the weeds, my broad criticism is the complete lack of planning when it comes to how we as a country want to handle our immigration. It's all just vibes. We have a lottery system for visas, for god's sake!

 

[as02155]

Fair point! I was approaching the immigration question from a national lens since that's where any legislation affecting it would come from, but for Boston in particular, NBC is quoting 38% foreign-born in 1850, 29% as of 2021. Wikipedia has Massachusetts at 18% in 2023.



I don't know about that. I think we can definitely look at other countries as case-studies, albeit not perfect analogs:

(2024 % Foreign-born population) - From Wikipedia
Australia - 30%
New Zealand - 28%
Canada - 23%
UK - 17%
US - 15%

That's a lot of good data from countries similar to the U.S. that have larger foreign-born populations. I don't think it's asking too much to do some unbiased critical analysis of the positive and negative effects of that larger % on the lives of the people in those countries.

While all of this is getting into the weeds, my broad criticism is the complete lack of planning when it comes to how we as a country want to handle our immigration. It's all just vibes. We have a lottery system for visas, for god's sake!

We went away with the "planned" White supremacist immigration system in 1965. The diversity lottery is a minority of immigration visas. Most visas are for family preference or immediate relative. The immigration reform that's needed is equally about normalizing non-immigrant workers without papers or allowing a larger amount of employment visas.

 

[3decker]

We went away with the "planned" White supremacist immigration system in 1965. The diversity lottery is a minority of immigration visas. Most visas are for family preference or immediate relative. The immigration reform that's needed is equally about normalizing non-immigrant workers without papers or allowing a larger amount of employment visas.

I'm aware that the diversity lottery is only a small portion of visas, but it really shouldn't be any portion. Every immigrant increases the diversity of the U.S.; we don't need to be a perfect microcosm of the world population. If we are going to restrict immigration, we should be selecting for those who will bring the most benefit to the country (expertise in job areas with a shortage of workers, highly educated, big spenders/investors into U.S. assets, etc.)

 

[commuter guy]

"...we should be selecting for those who will bring the most benefit to the country (expertise in job areas with a shortage of workers, highly educated, big spenders/investors into U.S. assets, etc.)

This is more or less the immigration system of Canada, an economic merit based system.

 

[MrDee12345]

A general response to all the recent posts:

1. Just because immigration was one way back in the 1920s, doesn't mean it's that way now. We have laws and I think that when laws are made, they should be enforced.

That being said, I'm not unsympathetic towards people who are willing to risk their lives to come to America to try to give their family a better life. I think that at the very least, we can recognize the difference between people in the country legally vs those who are in the country illegally when we're trying to make policy. I'm not against sanctuary cities in theory, but we also need local authorities to be able to work with the feds when dealing with people who may be both illegal and trying to cause harm to the community.

2. Whereas I do believe that immigration law needs to be enforced now, I'm not against an eventual move towards an EU style "freedom of movement" amongst our peer countries.

3. Canada may have taken in a lot of immigrants as of late, but they have FAR fewer immigrants who are there illegally.

 

[22marc]

This is more or less the immigration system of Canada, an economic merit based system.

is this a joke?

 

[commuter guy]

is this a joke?

No