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The Marblehead Independent has never endorsed a candidate or published an editorial. Our work has been to report what candidates say and do, check it and leave the deciding to readers. But we’ve reserved the right to speak when the evidence compelled us. It does now.
U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton is running for the Senate, leaving the 6th Congressional District seat open, and whoever wins the Sept. 1 Democratic primary will hold it a long time. What that person can accomplish reaches this town: whether a seawall gets federal money, whether housing programs survive the next budget, whether resilience funding arrives before the storm or after. We have watched nearly every debate and forum in this race, in person, on YouTube and on public access television, and read the candidates' Federal Election Commission filings line by line. The Independent endorses state Rep. Tram Nguyen.
Six Democrats are running and they agree about most things, so the question is not who holds the right positions but who has shown they can turn one into law.
That does not require prior service in a legislature. Moulton took this seat in 2014 having never held office, and Dan Koh's years in the Biden White House, at the Labor Department and at Boston City Hall taught him how federal money moves and who answers the phone. Bethany Andres-Beck brings artificial intelligence expertise; John Beccia an outsider's view; Mariah Lancaster work in Congress and the State Department; Jamie Belsito service in the Massachusetts House.
That last point matters: Nguyen is not the only candidate who has written laws. What sets her apart is that she is still doing it, and her colleagues put her in charge of a committee. She has been in the Massachusetts House since 2019 and chairs the House Committee on Climate Action and Sustainability.
One piece of work shows how. Before she ran for office, Nguyen was a legal-aid lawyer for survivors of domestic violence. She kept seeing people controlled through money, movement, surveillance and threats, conduct that stripped a person's autonomy without meeting Massachusetts' definition of abuse. She and state Rep. Natalie Higgins filed a bill naming the pattern: coercive control. It did not become law under its own number. The language entered a broader package the House passed unanimously in January 2024, the Senate rewrote it, the chambers reconciled and Gov. Maura Healey signed the result that June. Massachusetts law now counts coercive control as abuse, grounds for a restraining order.
Nor was it a one-off. In 2021, Nguyen and state Rep. Patricia Haddad wrote a statewide standard for the certifications immigrant crime victims need to seek federal protection. It entered the state budget and became law that July. Agencies that could once ignore those requests must answer within 90 days. A bureaucratic silence became a legal deadline.
More than 50 state legislators who watched that work have endorsed her, as have U.S. Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Lori Trahan, who backed her Aug. 24 and know the job. Trahan narrowly beat Koh in the 2018 primary in the 3rd District; readers should weigh that.
The most compelling argument against this endorsement is Koh's: that a district dependent on federal funding needs someone who already knows Washington. We weigh these priorities differently. Familiarity with the Capitol does not equate to legislative competence. And running a strong campaign is not the same as governing.
Nguyen has never represented Marblehead, and we will not invent a connection. Beacon Hill has a supermajority where consensus is cheap. Congress does not. Those are legitimate reasons to vote for someone else.
Our campaign-finance reporting points the same way. Most of Koh's $4.5 million came in large checks from Boston and New York. Beccia's war chest is mostly a $3 million self-loan. Nguyen raised roughly a seventh of Koh's total, nearly all from Massachusetts. None of this is improper. Those numbers say where a coalition lives, not what anyone's character is.
The choice is not between a competent candidate and five unprepared ones. It is a judgment about which preparation this district buys with one vote. What Nguyen carries is a lawyer's view of where the law fails people; the patience to move a remedy through committees and rewrites; colleagues who gave her a gavel and their endorsements; and a campaign funded close to home. No single credential separates her from this field. The combination does.
Nell Escobar Coakley, former managing editor of the Marblehead Reporter; Chris Stevens, the Reporter's editor for many years; and Will Dowd, founder and editor of the Marblehead Independent, sit on The Independent's editorial board.
