In Brookline Park, Sen. Ed Markey Exudes Conviction and Takes on Campaign Challenges Two Days Before Election

"The election is Tuesday, and elections really matter," Mass. State Representative for the 5th Norfolk district Rep Tommy Vitolo began. "As they say, we can choose Diet Coke, or Classic Coke. We've got a Congresswoman and a Senator here."

On August 30, two days before the Massachusetts state primary election, a large group of people at Emerson Park in Brookline got to schmooze with them.

They also saw and heard what is perhaps the reason that despite constant challenges, Markey has held a consistent lead over challenger Congressman Seth Moulton, whose major line of attack had been the issue of age. Markey, who recently turned 80, appeared by every measure to put those apprehensions to rest. He was articulate, fiery, focused and confidently took on each campaign charge.

“When Seth Moulton says that AI is a big issue, I have the bill with Ayanna and with others in order to put the protections in place,” Markey countered. “And by the way, just this week, in California, there was a 17 billion dollar verdict against Meta, against Matt Zuckerberg. And the Attorney General of California used my law, the children's online financial protection law, as the basis for extracting that 17 billion dollar settlement that is going to go to Massachusetts.”

Cannot argue with that. Rather than exhibiting a mastery of artificial intelligence platforms and algorithms per se, he’s going beneath the surface and addressing its potentially deleterious repercussions, protecting his constituents above all. As supporters milled about among reporters and Markey campaign personnel including communications director Jonathan Ng and “Nick on the digital team,” it was a special and intimate chance to hear the man himself – and for many, a rewarding one.

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“We received 300 million in Massachusetts alone so that we can put that money into mental health programs,” Markey continued. “We can put that money into prevention programs.That is my law.”

To him, it was par for the legislative course. “That is what Ayanna and I do every single day,” he continued in his distinctive, Malden-inflected brogue. “How many of you ever watch the show ‘West Wing’? He asked (even the younger members of the crowd surprisingly raised their hands). “You know, well, one of my favorite episodes is the episode entitled ‘Let Bartlett be Bartlett,’” Markey added. “So in this race, I'm just letting Markey be Markey. And we'll just let the chips fall where they may.” He was fearless, determined and capable, and the crowd ate it up.

Speaking of those youthful attendees, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School student Frankie Muir was the first speaker. Muir, a Youth Advocate in the Markey campaign, exhibited profound and remarkable knowledge of political eras long before her time. “I have lived in Massachusetts my whole life. And right next to my house, there's this big mural of Tip O'Neill. And on the mural, it says ‘All Politics Is Local,’” she said.

“But often, politics isn't local, or it can feel inaccessible,” Muir continued. “And that is why you need an advocate who can fight for the needs of local people. A senator who will bring the concerns and values of his constituents to Washington. And that is why I am so proud to be supporting Senator Ed Markey.”

The EFFECTIVE Food Procurement Act

She cited “The EFFECTIVE Food Procurement Act,” which Markey introduced this past December with Rep. Alma Adams, which sought to buttress a healthier and more sustainable food network across the country by instituting targets for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to help farmers and boost agriculture sustainability, increase healthy food choices, counter climate change.

“And although there may be a tiny, tiny little age gap between myself and the Senator,” Muir said, “I know he has the needs of my generation at the forefront of his policy.” She cited policies Markey had championed like the Green New Deal and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, by both of which benefited everyday Americans. “Dedication, connection, initiative, and a real plan, especially with the current administration in power. The atrocities committed need to be checked, and Ed Markey is ready to bring that to the table,” she said, wrapping it up with Tip’s quote: “All politics might not be local, but it starts local.”

Christopher Street Project

Following Muir was Tyler Hack, founder and executive director of the Christopher Street Project, which works to elect supporters of trans rights to public office.

“I am from a generation of trans people who learned very young what it feels like for politicians to debate you in public,” said Hack, 21, articulating concerns very personal to the trans community. “Whether you should have healthcare, whether you should be able to have your name on your ID, whether you should be able to participate in sports. And you tell yourself, it's politics. You tell yourself, this is how it goes, but it's personal because they're talking about you. And there are kids sitting at home watching us right now. Some politicians don't think they're paying attention, but they are.” Trans people have been scared since the 2024 election, and, Hack noted, that just 48 hours later, “Moulton went to the New York Times and said his campaign may have lost because of trans kids in schools – Not because of Republican billionaires ripping us off. Not because of corporations. Because of trans kids.”

A “fake apology issued two years later” wasn’t going to repair that harm, and spurred Hack’s decision to get involved in politics. It was unacceptable, Hack said, lauding those who are fighting for trans rights instead: “For me, one of those people is Senator Ed Markey. When it would have been easy to be silent, he got louder. When he could have treated trans kids as a political liability, he chose to see them as human beings, and he actually envisioned what equality could look like in practice. And he wrote it down. The Trans Bill of Rights.”

So that they could go to school, have their names on their IDs, obtain health care, and – the greatest privilege of all – to grow old. Hack said the election had nothing to do with age. “I'm 21, and I need a senator who will fight for my future. And we don't need a younger politician who believes in older politics. The age of the candidate doesn't matter if what they really believe in is an age of incrementalism. It doesn't matter.” What instead matters is when a leader fights for your cause, your right to exist, Hack maintained. “And Ed has done that for people like me. There's no one whose office I work with more, whether it's combating these data privacy bills and working with his team on online safety, or whether it's delivering the trans bill of rights.” This, Hack said, was an opportunity to show the nation how to win by standing for your values and leaving no one behind.

“I am really excited for what you are going to prove to the nation on Tuesday and to build a democratic party where everyone belongs, no matter what they look like, no matter who they love, and how they may identify, they belong here,” Hack ended, before introducing another public figure who had also been a champion for trans people, “who introduced a bill called the Name Accuracy and Credit Reporting Act, which would make sure that credit bureaus use trans people's real names, and included in her People's Justice Act provisions protecting transgender incarcerated people, some of the most vulnerable people in this country.”

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley then thanked both introductory speakers. She said she’d just dropped off her family’s 18-year-old at Howard University as a freshman. “The conversations that I have with her and what you both have just displayed, you know, right here,” she said. “It emboldens all of us and restores our hope about what is possible. I'm asked every day, what should I do? What can we do in this moment? My refrain is always the same. If you are a parent by blood or by bond, by community, mother, father, uncle, just raise good humans.”

Pressley addressed what she called “policy violence,” which she referred to as “proof positive of what happens when people that are void of empathy, that have a deficit of compassion.” She said she was an only child who married into a big family, so big that she doesn’t even know some of the people they were going to events for. “My husband, however, said, ‘you know, you always inconvenience yourself for family,’” she said. “And so we thank you for inconveniencing yourself for family, for movement family, for human family, given the stakes of this election.”

Markey, Pressley said, didn’t need any convincing of that, given his urgency to fight each day. And she quickly addressed the campaign’s overriding issue of age. “Let me just say this,” she said. “I came into Congress in the 116th Congress with some of the youngest people to ever be elected to Congress.” She cited Representatives Ocasio-Cortez and Lauren Ashley Underwood, both in their 30s. “I worked to elect people like Maxwell Frost and more recently, Justin Pearson,” she said. “And I didn't support any of them because of their age. I'm not an ageist on any end of the spectrum, because I've also had the opportunity to be mentored by the great Elijah Cummings, by the great John Lewis, may they rest in peace and power.”

She then praised her more venerable colleagues. “To strategize, to plan, to organize with people like Barbara Lee, to serve on committees with Maxine Waters and Elizabeth Warren, we just delivered a major bipartisan housing bill. So I just say all that to say that it truly is about the strength of your fight, the boldness of your ideas, and the clarity of your morals, and the reliability of your conscience.” With only 100 Senators at a time, she said, there was no room for mediocrity. Policies aren’t just documents. “Policies quite literally determine who lives. Policies determine who dies. Policies determine who survives and who thrives,” Pressley stressed. “And anyone that won't fight for the full citizenship, and equality, and humanity, and dignity, and safety, and joy of every single person” – as opposed to: “We have a dictator occupying the Oval Office. We have a fascist and cronies in a complicit Supreme Court that are quite literally legislating deservedness. And Massachusetts is supposed to be a leader.”

Pressley told the crowd that they were entitled to something better, not a senator complicit in “legislating deservedness.” They were all entitled to pursue higher education, to see a doctor, to have a home, to make their dreams reality. Markey, she said, embodied that. “It's not because he's my friend. I don't give anyone anything. Y'all should know that,” she said. “If you see me deliver a question line in committee, I don't give an inch. And I don't give anyone my endorsement. Ed Markey has earned it.” Especially as a Black woman, she added, “When you have had to agitate, litigate, organize, and mobilize for every right, and people are working actively to roll all of those games back.” The pendulum, she said, had swung backward from the height of the pandemic, when people seemed more committed to racial justice and reform of the criminal legal system. “The switch up has been crazy y'all.”

But Markey has kept that commitment, as well as to issues like environmental racism, civil rights, and AI.

“Y'all could have been anywhere else,” she closed. “Thank you for giving a damn about your neighbor, your community. Thank you for believing that another world is possible. One where we choose people over profit. One where we choose peace over war. One where we choose freedom over fascism. And one where we choose Ed Markey!”

Markey took the mic calling her “The Reverend Ayanna Pressley,” who can preach the gospel and tell the truth. “She knows how to actually bring the message from the Sermon on the Mount right here into the politics of Massachusetts. That is Ayanna Pressley every single day on the floor of the United States House of Representatives,” he thundered, calling her the “True North” among the 435 names in the US House of Representatives. “She's a special presence over there,” he said. “She is the reincarnation of Martin Luther King Jr., of John Lewis, of all of these great leaders who spoke truth to power.”

He also lauded Muir and Hack. “And we're all going to be able to say, we met them in the early years. This is unlimited potential that God has given them to make a difference.” And he launched into the age thing. “I like to think of myself as the youngest guy in the room when it comes to ideas,” he said. “I love it. So that's what this race is really all about. It's all about who are you fighting for? What fights are you willing to make? What enemies are you willing to make in the years ahead? And so what Ayanna and I do is we spend our political capital for you.” That capital, he said, was “to the tune of millions upon millions from private equity going into my opponents.”

But Markey had the solution. “We believe that the many beat the money every time. We believe that we are going to win this race with the many. And we see you as the core of what this race is all about.” He then named bills he and Pressley had cosponsored. “Fair free transit. That's our bill. I am the Senate. Ayanna is the House,” he said. “Abolishing qualified immunity that prohibits families from being able to sue ICE agents if they have murdered their family members. I am the Senate. Ayanna is the House. On an AI civil rights act for the 21st century so that all of the discrimination in the physical world isn't allowed to morph over onto the AI world. Discrimination against women, against LGBTQ, against minorities, in housing, in education, in healthcare access,” he continued. “We need to have all of those values over-infusing this AI era with the values that we believe are important,” he said, addressing a hot-button issue of the race.

“These are just inanimate technologies. They're only as good as the values we infuse into the technologies. That is what we are doing with our AI civil rights act against every civil rights group in the United States of America.”

Other contrasting positions: “I support a trans bill of rights. I introduced that legislation. Seth Moulton threw the trans kids under the bus. I support Medicare for All. Seth Moulton opposes it. I voted against the one trillion dollar defense budget that Trump is using in Iran and Venezuela, and soon in Greenland and in Cuba and in Gdo knows where. I voted no. Seth Moulton voted yes to give Trump that money.”

Locally: “I voted to support, along with Ayanna, the billionaires, millionaires tax here in Massachusetts so that we would raise the money for free community college in Massachusetts,” Markey said. “That is now the law. And we have 40 percent more kids in community college today than we had just four years ago. Seth Moulton called that class warfare. You know the warfare? It was the rich declaring war on poor kids, blue collar kids all across Massachusetts.” Now, Markey said, Massachusetts was the model, like for many other times in the past, for the rest of the country, and we need to expand that to free four year public universities as well.

“This is an era where kids just cannot afford to go to college. That is what this race is all about,” he said. “It's about this clear line between myself and Seth Moulton. I am running as the progressive. I am running as someone who believes that the age of incrementalism is over. I'm running to say that Medicare For All must happen. That we have to restore the wind and solar all electric vehicle tax breaks.” The tragic and deadly flooding this week in Nepal, he said, was a warning.

“Those are my laws, by the way,” he said. “All those tax breaks for wind for solar, all the money for environmental justice, $65 billion that I worked for to put into Chelsea, to put into Roxbury, to put all across the Commonwealth. Environmental justice.” All said to great applause, and he then explained why it all was so personal.

“My mother used to say when I was 10, ‘Eddie, whatever you do, don't swim in the Malden River.’" Three blocks from my house, where he said he still lived [author’s note: as someone who spent early childhood in Malden and would regularly walk with Markey’s Charles Street area neighbor friends several years ago, we would run into the Senator and his wife outdoors. One friend told Markey his brothers would play basketball with him. Markey had one response: “Who won?”].

Markey explained that the river had been used by chemical companies, Converse Rubber, made every Converse All-Star on the Malden River. “They just used the Malden River as a sewer. And when your mother says don't swim in the Malden River because it was black, with a kind of a pre Jimi Hendrix Purple Haze over it. . . .” We still have a lot of work to do, he said, “to remediate all of the injustice because it's always the poorest war. It's always the war that had the least political power at the city council level.”

That was the foundation for his viewpoints on justice, he said. “I heard it from my mother, and the admonitions of your mother reverberate through your brain for your whole life, Right?” he asked, to sound agreement. “And so I see my job is making sure that every kid today gets those protections.” For free college, Medicare For All, to realize their dreams and abilities. He knows that very well. “My father was a truck driver. And I sat on my porch and I dreamed my dreams. I'm not smarter than my mother. She didn't go to college, but she could do calculus for fun at the kitchen table. I don't work harder than my father. A truck driver for the Hood milk company, that's a hard job. You got to leave the house at 4 in the morning. You got to get the milk bottles on the doors before 7 in the morning. We would hear him go out the front door every day for work,” he recalled.

“I'm not as smart as my mom. I got opportunities. I could sit on my porch in Malden and dream of who I could be. And I became a United States Senator,” he said. “But what really ticks me off right now? It's Donald Trump declaring war on all the programs for all of the boys and all of the girls sitting on every single porch in the country, and disproportionately increasingly if they're young, they're Black, they're brown, they're immigrants, they're poor.”

That, he said, was what brought out the Malden in him. “I still live in Malden. I still live in the environmental sacrifice war that I grew up in. And all these kids today, they're Salvadoran, they're Haitian. Malden High School last year was 25 percent white, 25 percent Black, 25 percent Asian, 25 percent Latino. It is one of the 10 most diverse high schools in America, and they're just as smart as I was. They work even harder as parents than my parents had to work.”

Markey ticked off his agenda following the election. “First, we restore the $1 trillion of Medicaid cuts. We restore the $300 billion on the Affordable Care Act. We double the NIH budget for all of our families. We make sure we restore all the wind and solar, all electric vehicle tax breaks that we're taking off the books. We make it even better for the 21st century.”

These programs, he chided, had been labeled socialism in the past, and he and Pressley had been called socialists. He had an answer to that: “The Republicans, they voted against Social Security in 1935. They called it socialism. They voted against Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. They called it socialism. They voted against Obamacare. They called it socialism. They voted against all of the Green New Deal, which is the 2022 law that Biden signed for wind and solar. They called it socialism.” But, they don’t look in the mirror. “ What do you call 100 years of tax breaks for the oil, gas, and coal industry?” Markey asked. “I call that socialism. And I say, let's give some of that socialism to every other family in our country, so they can survive and thrive in the future.” Loud applause, there.

This election two days away, he said, was the moment. “Democracy is on the ballot. On Tuesday night, all the network prognosticators are going to be commentating on what the election in Massachusetts meant in 2026. and we get a chance to say it meant there's a progressive wave that's coming across! It meant that there's a new vision to the Democratic party, and you get a chance in the final 48 hours to make that message pure and be delivered across our country. Massachusetts is number one. We're only 2 percent of America. We're not an ordinary 2 percent. And on Tuesday night, you're going to get a chance to deliver that message to the nation.”

Markey then went into the crowd and seemingly chatted with everyone, posing for selfies, back-slapping and just being an everyday mensch, like this was the most important place for him to be at that critical election time moment.

“Ed Markey has been running for the US Senate to ensure that we have the resources we need here in Massachusetts,” said Brookline native and Massachusetts Democratic State convention Markey delegate Samuel Pierce of Boston (no relation to Brookline’s Pierce school, which he attended from K-8, and which he added was one of the few pre-K-8 schools left). “The first time I was a delegate was in 2013, and I've been supporting him ever since,” he said.

Nearby was Len Paolillo of Brookline, another Markey delegate – in fact, for 35 years. “The first time he ran I supported him, and one of the things that I still support him for is his work on the environment,” he said. “He really cares about making sure that the environment is right for future generations.” He cited Markey’s efforts to curb the use of fossil fuels and advocacy for greener fuel programs. Paolillo has also been a delegate or an alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention three times: in 1988, 1992 and 2000.

John Businger, a former State Rep for the lower number districts in Brookline, said his former aide lived right down the street on Davis Avenue. Sporting a North/South Rail Link button, he explained that in 2015 he founded the North/South Rail Link Working Group and remains its Vice Chair (Brookline resident and former governor Mike Dukakis is the Chair). “The top transportation person for Governor Sargent (Francis W. Sargent, who served from 1969 to 1975) asked me to become involved,” he said with continued pride. “They picked me out of all the legislators. They thought I would be the best leader to form a group. So I formed a legislative caucus in 1992 and within a few years, it grew to include 193 out of 200 legislators.” He said Ted Kennedy had deemed him the strongest advocate in the state for the North/South, and that he and Sen. George Mitchell secured the original funding to start the process. Businger said he still speaks to his neighbor Dukakis every day. The Group still has over 200 members.

As reporters and attendees made their way out of the park, Markey could still be seen chatting, posing for selfies and mingling with the crowd. A man of the people and for the people, with two days remaining to secure another term despite the challenges of the campaign, there was obviously nowhere else he’d rather be.