Jess Scarane for Delaware
Jess Scarane, standing, talks to campaign workers at her Wilmington, Delaware, headquarters. She will challenge incumbent Senator Chris Coons in the state’s September 2020 Democratic primary.
The folk tale version of the “Delaware Way” which has been the state’s operating principle for time immemorial, is that Delaware is so small that everyone knows everyone, and thus any problem can be fixed by getting the right stakeholders into the same room. The more somber version is that the state’s finances are so tightly bound to the success of its incorporation business that both parties are in a constant state of deference to corporate interests, which generally makes the business of governing an easy proposition.
Perhaps no one in the Senate has been a bigger exporter of the Delaware Way than Chris Coons, and for the resurgent left, Coons’ insistence on triangulation and bipartisanship could not come at a worse time. Coons has repeatedly slammed progressive priorities such as the Green New Deal and Medicare for All as unrealistic, and drawn the ire of the left in voting for several of Donald Trump’s judicial nominees. He has often found himself more in concert with the right than the left in the Senate; recently, he was one of four Democratic co-sponsors on a budget reform bill that would help the GOP throw up even more institutional barriers to some of the bigger ideas coming out of the Democratic Party and the left.
Now, a millennial challenger in his home state is hoping to transfer Coons, and the Delaware Way, back to Delaware. As the Prospect reported over the weekend, Coons has drawn his first real primary challenge from the left in Jess Scarane, a 34-year-old Wilmington-based digital strategist at a marketing company who’s also served as the board president of the Delaware chapter of the nonprofit Girls Inc.
“In all that work, I recognized that there’s still so many problems that I see people facing every day, and a lot of that is affected by what's happening at a federal government level,” Scarane told the Prospect in a phone interview on Monday. “A lot of the problems we’re seeing in Wilmington and in Delaware and that a lot of the organizations I’m working with are trying to fix, they’re really combatting a federal government working against their interests in a lot of ways.”
Scarane has wasted no time in calling Coons out for his tendency to be conciliatory towards the GOP. “I think one of the things that has really harmed people is a lot of the compromises he makes at the expense of Delawareans,” says Scarane. “It’s a system that benefits him and the friends he’s made at Yale Law School and through the work that he’s done. He works to keep that structure in place rather than prioritizing the needs of people in Delaware.”
Coons does want the Senate to change - by becoming even more conservative than it already is. Along with Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, Coons organized a letter, signed by 61 senators, pledging to keep the filibuster in place, which would make any sort of progressive legislation that much harder should Democrats take control of the government next year. In September, during a discussion about the Senate and bipartisanship with former Senators Joe Donnelly and Jeff Flake, Coons suggested that it might not be possible to have a Senate that’s both diverse and doesn’t “produce irreconcilable discord.” (“Senator Coons is committed to improving diversity in our politics, in Congress, and throughout our country,” Coons’ office said in a statement at the time. “It’s clear that in this conversation, the Senator was talking about how difficult, but critically important, it has been to increase diversity in Congress, and also how far we still have to go.”)
Scarane takes the opposite view. “I think that what has caused the Senate to hold us back is the lack of a diversity of experiences and voices in that body,” she says. “The House is doing good work right now to pass legislation that’s just hitting a wall in the Senate. I recognize that’s because of Republican leadership, but even if we had Democratic leadership in place right now, do we have the right Democrats in place to keep pushing those ideas and progress forward, and I’m not sure that we do because of the lack of diversity that exists in that body right now.”
It’s not just Coons’ rhetoric, however; he’s actively helped the Trump administration achieve its goals. For Trump’s first two years, Coons was something of a reliable vote for his cabinet appointments, including former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar (a former pharmaceutical executive). In the 115th Congress, according to FiveThirtyEight, Coons voted with the Trump administration’s position 35 percent of the time.
This year, according to the same tracker, he’s only voted with Trump 7 percent of the time. However, the tracker doesn’t register votes on judicial nominations, which is practically all the Senate has done this year. The liberal group Demand Justice launched a five-figure ad in Delaware earlier in the year highlighting Coons’ support for 18 judges nominated by Trump who wouldn’t say whether or not Brown vs. Board of Education was a correct decision.
Scarane, on the other hand, might as well be the anti-Coons. Her platform reads like a laundry list of progressive priorities: Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, housing as a human right, and “free and equitable education” from kindergarten through higher education. “At the core, I’m running on a platform to put people over profits,” Scarane says. (In addition to Scarane, local crank Scott Walker—who ran for Congress as a Republican last year, getting crushed by Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester—has said he intends to challenge Coons in the Democratic primary.)
Coons’ office responded to the challenge by framing his willingness to work with Republicans as enabling progress to be achieved rather than obstructing it. "I’m proud to be a Delaware Democrat and to fight for our principles. That means challenging President Trump and his allies in Congress when they run afoul of our most basic values as a nation, but I’m also someone who works across the aisle to get done what we can in this environment to make our state and our community stronger,” Coons said in a statement provided to the Prospect. “I look forward to this election as another chance to listen to Delaware voters and to make sure I’m reflecting our values and priorities.”
Despite Delaware’s long-standing reputation as a corporate-friendly state—no doubt helped along by the leaders it’s selected, including Biden, Coons, Governor John Carney, and Senator Tom Carper, who fended off his own credible Senate challenge last year—the state is one of the friendliest for Democrats in the entire country. The last time a Republican was elected to the Senate in Delaware was 1994; the last time it elected a governor from the GOP, 1988. Currently, the party holds every statewide elected office as well as control of both chambers of the state legislature.
Among the other big names at the forefront of Delaware’s Democratic establishment, however, Coons might very well be the most vulnerable. In 2010, Coons, then the New Castle County executive, was widely seen as the party’s sacrificial lamb in a race to succeed Biden that widely favored then-GOP Congressman Mike Castle, a former governor of the state; as a testament to Castle’s strength, even Beau Biden passed on the race. But then Christine O’Donnell happened, and Coons was unexpectedly propelled into office. He won re-election against token opposition in 2014, a bad year for Democrats nationally, with an underwhelming 56 percent.
There are other reasons to believe that Delaware could be fertile ground for an upset. Last year, political novice Kerri Evelyn Harris challenged Carper, himself a former governor and a giant in the state’s politics, and managed to put up a respectable 35 percent despite being outraised 30-to-one by Carper. Scarane told the Intercept that the Harris campaign was “groundbreaking.” Coons was less impressed, telling the New York Times at the time that “a younger generation of candidates view themselves as not being willing to work their way up through elections and they want to go straight for primarying our most senior elected official.”
Scarane calls Coons’ fealty to the state’s establishment tradition “an example of the broken power structure that exists in our state. Everyone calls it the Delaware Way, and I think that’s one of the things that’s limiting us. It’s caused us to believe that we have to wait our turn to fight our change and what we believe is right.”
At the same time, Coons has no shortage of friends in the health care lobby or on Wall Street; along with Carper, Coons voted to roll back parts of Dodd-Frank in 2018. Those prodigious resources will certainly bear down on Scarane if she gains traction. In addition, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has made clear its intentions to forcefully protect its incumbents from primary challenges in 2020—regardless of ideology, as Representative Joe Kennedy is finding out in his challenge to liberal Senator Ed Markey in Massachusetts.
It’s also clear that, even if the state party stays out of the race officially, the party establishment isn’t keen on throwing Coons under the bus. In a statement, Delaware Democratic Party chair Erik Raser-Schramm welcomed Scarane to the race, but also praised Coons. He “has become one of the most important and articulate voices in America for many of the things our party values,” she said. “From his moral clarity on equality issues, women’s health care, and humane immigration reform, to his stalwart advocacy for solutions that will curb climate change and reduce gun violence, Senator Coons has always worked to move us forward in a productive, results-oriented way. His effectiveness is of enormous value in Washington right now.”
So far, Scarane hasn’t picked up any endorsements from left-leaning groups like Justice Democrats or the Working Families Party, which helped propel victories like those of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York as well as numerous state legislators and DAs around the country. Scarane said she’s had some “preliminary conversations.”
But if there’s one thing that Scarane has on her side, it’s time. The Delaware primary is September 15, 2020, giving Scarane a full ten months to campaign in a state that’s roughly two and a half hours long and home to fewer than a million people. Carper only needed 53,635 votes to handily win his primary last year. “We’ll have a lot of time to talk to a lot of voters in the state,” Scarane says. “One of the advantages of Delaware is its size. Our goal is to talk to tens of thousands of voters...this is going to be a campaign that’s on the streets knocking on doors and getting in front of voters, and hearing from them about what it is that’s going to make a material difference in their lives.”
She continued, “I recognize that this isn’t going to be easy, and I know we’re going to be up against these really well-funded corporate interests and people who maybe just don’t believe that a better option is possible. But that’s what I’m hoping this campaign can do, to bring people together and make them recognize that we deserve more...now’s the time to do it because we don’t have the time to sit back while the leaders we do have continue to compromise our future.”
