Ed Markey will win despite his views on trans athletes, not because of them

U.S. Senator Ed Markey, at 80 years young, defeated U.S. Representative Seth Moulton in Massachusetts’ Democratic Senate primary on September 1, taking about two-thirds of the vote after transgender athletes became one of the campaign’s sharpest fault lines.

Trans athletes competing in women’s sports has captured renewed national attention in recent weeks after the Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham spoke out about her views on the unfairness of pitting biological girls and boys against each other.

The irony in Massachusetts is that the intense culture war issue Markey used to browbeat his opponent, and which many Democrats attach great importance to, is one that polling shows the vast majority of the state’s residents actually agree with Moulton on.

Markey succeeded in making Moulton’s past comments a broader question of Democratic trust and solidarity with transgender people. It worked in the Democratic primary. And it almost certainly won’t matter in November’s midterms.

The dispute dates to the days after the 2024 election, when Moulton said his party should be able to discuss the issue and added that he did not want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”

Markey and his campaign had pressed the remark for months, accusing Moulton at an August debate of abandoning transgender children and siding with President Donald Trump and MAGA following the executive order on trans athletes.

Instead of owning his position—perfectly reasonable for most Massachusetts voters—Moulton apologized for the hurt his comments had caused and pointed to his support for trans rights bills.

He knew the damage they had caused among the Democratic primary electorate.

Two-Thirds Oppose Markey’s View

By the final August debate, the candidates’ literal positions had actually moved closer, because Moulton took a step toward Markey.

Moulton said transgender athletes should be allowed in girls’ sports, adding that there should be discussion about “safety and fairness.” Markey gave an unqualified endorsement of participation.

A March 2025 University of New Hampshire Bay State Poll pointed sharply in the restrictive direction: nearly two-thirds of Massachusetts residents believed transgender female athletes should be barred from women’s sports.

Not even a majority of Democrats agreed with each other. Forty-nine percent of Democrats said they believed trans female athletes should be allowed to participate in women’s sports; only 20 percent of independents and 1 percent of Republicans agreed.

An August UMass Amherst/WCVB poll of Massachusetts found a softer set of results: a plurality, not a majority.

Of registered voters, 44 percent supported legislation prohibiting transgender youth from joining school-sponsored teams matching their gender identity, compared with 36 percent opposed and 20 percent neither supporting nor opposing it.

But there was another telling result in the survey, which helps explain why Markey is still on course to win in November.

The cost of living is the issue voters rate most critical, as it is across the U.S. amid the war on Iran and the bloating of costs due to the Trump administration’s trade conflicts. The sports question divides voters without being, for most, important to their vote.

Massachusetts voters have shown strong support for broader transgender and LGBTQ protections than on the narrower question of trans athletes competing in women’s sports.

In 2018, voters kept a state law barring gender-identity discrimination in public accommodations by 68 percent to 32 percent of the ballots cast on the question.

PRRI’s 2025 American Values Atlas found 85 percent of Massachusetts residents supported nondiscrimination laws covering LGBTQ people in jobs, housing and public accommodations.

Sports, in other words, can function as a distinct policy question inside an electorate that remains strongly supportive of civil rights protections.

Why Seth Moulton Paid a Price

UMass poll director Tatishe Nteta, speaking before the primary, said Moulton’s transgender record had created a “significant vulnerability for Moulton” among Democratic voters.

Nteta pointed to findings that 68 percent saw Markey as better able to represent LGBTQ people and 67 percent said they would be less likely to support a candidate who expressed positions opposing transgender rights or policies.

Markey had successfully converted the transgender-athlete controversy into a question of which candidate better represented Massachusetts Democrats’ values.

Primary voters named Moulton’s position on transgender athletes as one of the key differences between the two men. That is powerful evidence that transgender politics hurt Moulton.

But naming an issue as a salient difference is not the same as endorsing a policy on it, and the 67 percent finding referenced above had grouped “rights or policies” together. Rights are easy to say you support; real-world policies get much stickier.

Neither result establishes that Democratic primary voters affirmatively backed Markey’s position on school sports, even if they do back his general openness and support for LGBT people.

It appears that Moulton lost the symbolic argument, even where his underlying concern about sports retained substantial public support.

Where the Policy Gets Tested

Markey now enters the general election as the clear favorite against Republican John Deaton, who ran unopposed in the Republican primary.

An August University of New Hampshire poll put Markey ahead 49 percent to 30 percent, with 7 percent for Party for Socialism and Liberation candidate Joe Tache and 12 percent undecided.

Deaton also ran for Senate in 2024, losing to Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren by almost 20 points. In reality, the Democratic primary is the main electoral hurdle in heavily Democratic Massachusetts.

Those advantages make a Markey victory a strong forecast rather than a certainty, of course. No one can predict the future.

Massachusetts will also not be the place that settles the argument on trans athletes. The general election there is not close enough for his sports position to cost Markey anything measurable.

The real test is on the same November ballot elsewhere: Measures restricting transgender student-athletes go before voters in Colorado, Washington and Arizona on November 3, with a fourth in Nebraska. The Supreme Court also upheld the West Virginia and Idaho bans in June.

Those are votes on the policy itself rather than on what a candidate’s position signals.

Massachusetts has a version of its own pending. The state’s interscholastic athletic association still permits participation and is under federal Title IX investigation by the Trump administration for it.

What Massachusetts does teach us is that voters can give a culture-war dispute broad moral and partisan meaning while holding a more complicated, and sometimes restrictive, view of the narrow policy underneath it.