Yesterday the seismic political news we’ve been waiting on for months finally dropped: Delaware Sen. Tom Carper won’t run for reelection this cycle, clearing the way for Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester to enter the race for this safe Democratic seat.
During his retirement speech, Sen. Carper said he would do everything he could to help her win: “You’ve been patient, waiting for me to get out of the way, and I’m going to get out of the way … I hope you will run and let me support you in that.”
It’s refreshing to see this actually happen: A man to step aside and explicitly throw his support behind a woman—and a woman of color—to be his successor. If more of our male elected officials, including those running this cycle, would do this, we could be guaranteed to add at least three new women to the Senate next year.
While we want women to compete and win in close partisan elections, retirements in safe seats like this one are the key to dramatically and quickly improving women’s numbers in Congress.
Unfortunately, our electoral maps are getting increasingly uncompetitive due to gerrymandering and population sorting—we’re lucky if a dozen seats per cycle are truly toss up races. However, 35 percent of the Democratic Senate caucus is men over 65 years old, and 83 percent of those members are in safe Democratic seats.
We can’t wait to watch Lisa run, and win. We were anticipating this race when we invited Lisa to speak at last fall’s Electing Women Alliance convening. Stay tuned in the coming months for opportunities to meet and support Lisa via your local EWA groups