Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., held off a well-funded primary challenger on Tuesday, extending a House career that began in 2001 and keeping in Congress the only remaining Democrat who voted against the Affordable Care Act.
Lynch defeated challenger Patrick Roath, a lawyer and past aide to former Gov. Deval Patrick. Roath had outraised the incumbent, according to recent federal filings.
Thirteen congressional incumbents have lost primaries this year — a group that includes controversial House Republicans, GOP foes of President Donald Trump and Democrats whom their party’s left flank deemed insufficiently able to seize the political moment.
Lynch appeared at risk ahead of Tuesday’s contest, given the uncertainty around incumbency throughout the nation. But being a sitting member of Congress still comes with plenty of advantages, and most members of Congress have won their primaries.
The exceptions have been clarifying about both major parties’ identities at this stage of the Trump era. Republican primary voters have both ousted Trump antagonists from the party, and also voted out some more controversial incumbents backed by the president. Democratic primary voters have shown an embrace of a more energetic campaign approach, that favors more intense rhetoric and promises for challenging what’s long been taking place in Washington.
Lynch was one of 34 House Democrats who voted against the landmark ACA in March 2010, one of the signature domestic achievements of Barack Obama’s presidency. In a statement that year, Lynch said the bill would “cost almost a trillion dollars” while offering “little to reform the current skyrocketing costs of the fee-for-service system that is dominated by the insurance industry.”
Roath made that vote part of his campaign in Massachusetts 8th Congressional District, which takes in parts of Boston and its southern suburbs. “This is a safe blue seat, we need a fighter,” Roath said in a social media post earlier this week
Lynch will return to a Washington where that 2010 vote has become an argument he no longer has to win — but one his challengers can keep making. Thirty-four House Democrats voted against the health-care law back in 2010. He is the last of them still in office.
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