The results are in on the highly contested MA senate primary race between incumbent Senator Ed Markey and 4-term Congressman Joe Kennedy. While about 15% of the vote remains to be counted, it appears that Markey has won by about 10 points. That’s an amazing margin considering that he was trailing by double digits when Kennedy first announced his primary challenge and Markey was widely seen as the next Washington insider destined for the dustbin.
But as just about every activist in a wide range of causes pointed out when hearing of the primary challenge, Ed Markey is not your typical Washington insider. To the contrary, Markey has shown leadership on a host of vitally important issues for decades — and long before they were popular in democratic caucus. Markey’s campaign also bucked conventional wisdom by running aggressively on his record. Markey’s Senate win in 2014 was assured when he won the democratic primary, so it is unsurprising that many people in the state outside the activist community were unaware of just how much they owe to Ed Markey. Readers here most likely know him for his telecom work, but the impressive list includes fighting for the environment before it was cool, fighting for privacy before it was cool, and fighting for accessibility rights (which, sadly, is still not as cool as it should be). Markey’s commitment on the environment goes back well before the Green New Deal, and he was huge in writing the pro-environmental provisions in the 2005 Energy Act. He was a primary drafter of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1999. He is responsible for the closed captioning provisions and the video description provisions of the Communications Act.
And, of course, he was one of the earliest supporters of net neutrality, going up against members of his own party to fight the anti-net neutrality provisions of the 2006 effort to rewrite the Communications Act. You can see me gush about Markey back in 2006 here. But my appreciation for Markey goes back to the 1990s, when he was one of the few members of Congress who actually cared enough about getting the technical issues right to dig in deep on the creation of ICANN.
All of this paid off yesterday in Markey’s primary challenge. Markey’s early decision to back net neutrality — like his decisions on privacy and disability access — were made when no one thought any of these things would matter in an election one way or another. And I’m not going to claim that net neutrality was a deciding issue for the voters of Massachusetts. But it is part of an overall record that established Markey as a genuine progressive leader and effective fighter long before anyone considered those election advantages. In particular, net neutrality is a highly popular issue among the young online progressive activist community that press reports are saying were essential to Markey’s astonishing turn around from trailing by double digits to winning by double digits (or almost double digits depending on the final count).