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U.S. Senator Tom Carper managed to stave off progressive Kerri Evelyn Harris in Delaware’s Democratic Primary on Thursday, surviving his most competitive primary since he joined the Senate in 2000.
Though Delaware leans comfortably in favor of Democrats, the state’s top elected officials have tended to embraced moderate, corporate-friendly policies. The state has long served as a tax haven to corporations and wealthy elites across the United States, a position that’s created a vacuum of progressive leadership.
Seeking to change this trend, Harris surged as a formidable opponent in the Democratic primary against Carper. In the process, she’s helped kickstart a Delaware progressive movement that has put entrenched incumbents on notice and begun to dismantle the “Delaware Way”: Democrats and Republicans coddling the state’s corporate interests under the pretense that doing so works best for the people of Delaware.
The state has often been defined by the ‘Delaware Way’: both parties coddling corporate interests under the pretense that doing so works best for the people.
Carper’s three terms in the Senate have embodied centrism, even as resistance to the presidency of Donald Trump has put even more political pressure on Democrats in office to fully oppose the Trump Administration. Carper has aligned with Trump on more than 35 percent of his Senate votes, including supporting the confirmation of Trump’s Energy Secretary Rick Perry, rolling back Dodd-Frank banking regulations, and siding with Republicans to vote against an amendment to the GOP tax bill to prohibit cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
“The voice of the average Delawarean has been forgotten in the legislation Senator Carper has either sponsored, helped pass, or draft,” Harris tells The Progressive in an interview. “I kept seeing we were falling behind but we didn’t have a representative who really stood up for us. We can’t keep waiting for somebody to understand what we’re going through. I’m a working class person here in Delaware.”
Harris says poverty rates in several cities in Delaware, like Wilmington, are much higher than the national average, and adds that a lack of understanding that trickle down economics doesn’t work has contributed to a struggling working class. Her primary challenge against Carper pushed him to the left on several issues, including changing support in favor of importing cheaper prescription drugs from Canada after voting against it several times over the past decade. In August 2018, Carper co-sponsored his first marijuana reform bill ever.
On September 6, Harris received 35.4 percent of the vote in the Democratic Primary against Carper. Though Harris lost her bid to unseat Carper, her campaign was the first viable challenge of the Democratic Party establishment since Carper was first elected, and helped set a foundation for the progressive movement to start expanding through the state. The race set a voter turnout record for a non-presidential primary.
The race was by far the most high-profile primary in Delaware. The state’s only congressional representative, Lisa Blunt Rochester, faced no opposition in her Democratic Primary race. The only other competitive statewide race was for Attorney General, where Chris Johnson, backed by the Real Justice PAC and criminal justice reform activist and journalist Shaun King, faced off against former Department of Justice prosecutor Kathy Jennings. Johnson ultimately came up short against Jennings, who won the four-way race with relative ease.
“The Democratic Party is changing in our state and we’re more ready for change, which is why I ran now,” Harris says. “There are people within the party ready to move forward and become the party of the people, but the old guard and new guard are influx right now.”
‘Change only happens when we choose change,’ Harris tells The Progressive.
Her campaign tapped into these sentiments to build a movement with more than 500 volunteers that focused on embracing the power of the people within grassroots movement and the option of a viable progressive challenger to Carper helped expose several aspects of his voting record that are antithetical to progressives and presupposed Democratic Party values.
Carper has voted in favor of offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Virginia, supported the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, and received more than $163,000 in campaign donations this election cycle from energy and natural resource corporations. And he is the only sitting Democrat in the Senate who voted in favor of conservative Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s 2006 appointment as a U.S. Circuit Court Judge.
“Change only happens when we choose change,” adds Harris. “We’re starting to pay more attention and notice we have to be vigilant, because all legislation from local and state to national makes a difference. We are seeing an electorate in Delaware opening up and becoming aware of what’s going on.”