In this crucial midterm election year, men and women who served in the military are wooing voters by presenting themselves as tougher, more effective foes of MAGA incumbents and even long-serving Democrats. In Massachusetts, a fifty-year-old former Marine captain, whose career has inspired other vets to run for office, is playing the vet (and youth) card in his September 1 primary challenge to nearly eighty-year-old Senator Ed Markey.

“We can’t just have people who seem like tired old Democrats,” says US Representative Seth Moulton, who is giving up his House seat to challenge Markey. To illustrate his point, Moulton recently did some rhetorical muscle-flexing, when a fellow post-9/11 combat vet — Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — told a congressional hearing in May that the US war on Iran was “an astounding military success.” Moulton pushed back, arguing that the conflict was an unpopular boondoggle.

Across the country, other anti-MAGA “service candidates” have questioned billions in new Pentagon spending on another Middle Eastern war and criticized a simultaneous Donald Trump assault on domestic social programs, immigrants and labor, civil liberties and voting rights, and environmental protection.