DEMOCRAT ALEX RIKLEEN is ending his US Senate campaign and endorsing Sen. Ed Markey, backing the incumbent over challenger US Rep. Seth Moulton ahead of this weekend’s Democratic convention in Worcester.
Rikleen, a former history teacher and fantasy sports writer making his first run for public office, launched his longshot Senate bid a year ago with calls for Democrats to more aggressively confront President Donald Trump and pursue sweeping reforms to the country’s political institutions.
He told the News Service in an exclusive interview that he plans to endorse Markey this weekend at the Massachusetts Democratic Party’s nominating convention, where he will speak at the senator’s breakfast before delegates gather at the DCU Center.
“Once you decide that you don’t see a path, that all of a sudden becomes really hard to keep it going,” Rikleen said. “The assumptions that we had to how this might keep going stopped making sense, and we felt that this was an opportunity to use the voice, use the momentum that we had built to support Senator Markey.”
The latest poll on the race by Emerson College showed Markey five points above Moulton, receiving 37 percent and 32 percent respectively, with 29 percent of respondents undecided. Rikleen received 1 percent, as did another progressive candidate William Gates.
Rikleen has positioned himself to Markey’s left and argued Democrats were failing to meet the urgency of Trump’s return to power. His campaign centered less on ideological differences with Markey than on what he repeatedly called “priorities” — particularly judicial reform, voting rights protections and campaign finance changes that he argued were necessary before broader Democratic policy goals could survive.
“Democrats have shown us that they’re not going to change on their own,” Rikleen said when he launched his campaign.
Over the course of the campaign, he called for expanding the Supreme Court, imposing term limits on justices, strengthening voting rights laws and overhauling campaign finance rules in the wake of the Citizens United decision. On his campaign website, Rikleen argued that “a Democratic party that is not serious about court reform is a party that is not serious about good governance.”
He also framed the race as part of a broader struggle over democratic institutions.
“The Trump administration is trying to end American democracy,” Rikleen wrote on his website, where he urged Democrats to “use every lever available” to resist the administration and reject any “strategic retreat” from defending marginalized groups.
Asked this week why he decided to run, Rikleen returned to many of the same themes.
“I got into this race because I felt that we needed a more assertive Democratic party to fight back against Trump, and to try to make sure that Democrats were paying attention to history,” he said. “I’m a former history teacher. I thought that we need to use every lever available to us to be fighting back against this administration.”
The race shifted last fall when Moulton entered, offering Democratic primary voters a more moderate alternative to Markey and drawing significant media attention.
Though Moulton’s candidacy altered the dynamic of the race, Rikleen said it didn’t fundamentally change his campaign’s mission to call on Democrats to stand up to Trump.
“He is also currently serving in Congress, and so it didn’t change any of the core assumptions,” Rikleen said. “In some ways he took up some attention, but in other ways he called more attention to the race.”
He added that Moulton’s “entire campaign focuses on generational change, but he hasn’t explained how swapping one sitting congressman for a younger one advances any of the issues people my age (or younger) care about,” which he listed as the climate, LGBTQ+ and racial civil rights, “fixing” the Supreme Court and “fighting corporate power.”
“The senator’s track record is just obviously better and more consistent than the representative’s,” he said.
Rikleen said his differences with Markey were often more about emphasis than ideology.
“On every meaningful issue we were, if not on the same page, we were close,” he said. “My biggest issues were prioritization.”
He pointed specifically to court reform and called Markey “legitimately the best senator in the United States Senate on that issue” though he “thought there was room for him to push a little farther.”
For Rikleen, his first run for office was “drinking out of a fire hose constantly, every day, for a year,” he said, laughing. Still, he described the campaign as “energizing and exciting and fun, and rewarding.”
“When you believe you’re fighting for a good cause, waking up every day is very easy,” he said.
Rikleen said the experience also deepened his appreciation for voters’ attachment to elected officials and the seriousness with which they approach politics.
“There were people who agreed with me on a lot of what I had to say, but they still wanted to continue supporting Senator Markey because of what he’s done throughout his career,” he said. “Experiencing that every single day, dozens or hundreds of times, really drills that point home.”
As for whether he might seek office again, Rikleen said he is not ready to decide.
“I sincerely don’t know. This is hard, and it’s hard on my wife, and on my kids,” he said. He noted that the convention in Worcester falls on his 10th wedding anniversary. “I have the most incredible and patient wife of all time.”
“There was a lot I really enjoyed about it, but I can’t make a decision without them,” he said. “So let’s do one thing at a time. Let’s get Senator Markey reelected, and we’ll see what the future brings.”
