Headline: What is virtue?
To the editor:
This is a question that animates a great many Democratic primary voters: Which candidate is the morally righteous choice?
When I contemplate this question I think of Sarah McBride and Jared Golden. They are Democrats who represent Delaware’s at-large congressional district and Maine’s second respectively.
Delaware elected Sarah McBride to Congress in 2024, running a point ahead of Kamala Harris by focusing on affordability and access to healthcare.
She is also the first and only transgender member of Congress. On joining the House, Republicans led by Speaker Mike Johnson and South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace tried to make a spectacle out of McBride over which bathroom she would use.
She did not take the bait and simply focused on her job: representing Delaware with dignity and integrity.
This is virtue.
Jared Golden represents the most pro-Trump district held by a Democrat in the current Congress. First elected in 2018, Golden won re-election in 2024 by less than a point in a district Trump carried by nine. No elected Democrat is as skilled at persuading Trump voters as Jared Golden.
Golden’s mix of issue positions is unorthodox. He is pro-gun rights, but also pro-choice and pro-same sex marriage. He voted for continuing government funding that included money for ICE, but he also voted to protect the Dreamers.
And when Sarah McBride eventually wrote to Speaker Johnson to highlight the rise of anti-trans hate in America, Jared Golden stood by her and co-signed her letter.
The price paid by Jared Golden for his views has been death threats against his family by the far-right, and relentless attacks against his character from the far-left. Despite all of this, he has held that seat down for Democrats for six years.
This, also, is virtue.
Republicans won the House 220 to 215 at the last election. A few more Jared Goldens and Hakeem Jeffries becomes speaker and Sarah McBride enters the chamber not as a target, but as a member with the dignity to choose for herself.
There is no virtue in Democrats demonizing Jared Goldens so that Republicans can demonize Sarah McBrides.
Massachusetts Democrats should take this to heart. When we select leaders who demand maximum ideological purity over electoral realism, we rarely pay the heaviest price. It is people like the mothers and fathers of Minneapolis who have to stand in the
cold at their children’s schools on the lookout for masked government agents who pay that price for us.
This isn’t a call for moderation, but for toleration. The tolerance required to build a big tent and establish durable majorities.
Any reasonable examination of the platforms of Ed Markey and Seth Moulton will show they are both significantly more progressive than the rest of the country. But Ed Markey is aligned to the wing of the Democratic party fixated on purity. His counterpart in the Senate, Elizabeth Warren, called for Democrats to reject supply-side liberals like me earlier this year. And Markey’s Senate ally, Bernie Sanders (who isn’t even a registered Democrat!), recently said at a rally that as important as defeating Republicans is preventing the election of moderate Democrats. No more Jared Goldens.
What of the alternative to Markey, Seth Moulton? He is the one who recruited Jared Golden to run for Congress in the first place, flipping a seat from red to blue and putting Democrats closer to delivering decency for more Sarah McBrides.
This is virtue.
Nick Ward
Rolleston Road
