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WILMINGTON, Del. – Senator Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.) Blocked a challenger to his left in the first decisive defeat of activist Kerri Harris in one of the last intraparties fights of the year.
Carper, 71, is now favored for a fourth term in a state where his center-left policy has helped shape his pro-business democratic party. But the challenge of Harris, a 38-year-old Air Force veteran who takes office, revealed a change in Carper's party and the existence of a block of left-wing voices in a state where Moderate suburbs usually dominate.
This block is not important enough to scare Carper: Harris gets 35% of the vote, eclipsed by the 65% of Carper.
The senator, who won 12 general elections for various offices in Delaware – and lost none – did not seem immediately vulnerable to a challenge. The Republicans, who also chose a candidate on Thursday, struggled to find a top-ranked challenger; Sussex County Councilor Rob Arlett called Thursday's appointment with 67 percent of the vote.
In the first six months of his campaign, Harris raised less than $ 25,000, which is not enough to run a credible race in a state with 367,000 registered Democrats.
But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's first victory in New York on June 26 was a boost for the left and for insurgent groups such as Justice Democrats and Working Families Party. Both made their first interventions in Delaware politics, as the Ocasio-Cortez campaign sent staff to Delaware to launch a voter targeting campaign for Harris.
Kerri Harris speaks at a University of Delaware Town Hall on August 31. (Patrick Semansky / AP)
Unlike longtime historical representative Joseph Crowley, who lost to Ocasio-Cortez, Carper was not surprised.
He surpassed Harris by a 10-1 ratio, building a team on the field before his team started and buying digital ads for the sometimes-somnolent Democratic electorate of the state. Joe Biden recorded a phone call for him, citing the record that Harris attacked: eight years as a popular governor in triangulation and 18 years as a centrist senator who sometimes broke with his party, mainly in banking and financial matters . Carper's also moved significantly to the left, getting a minimum wage of $ 15 an hour and decriminalizing marijuana.
Harris argued that Carper's "lens" as an established, business-friendly politician led to dangerous mistakes. During a debate, she supported Mr. Carper for supporting a partial dismantling of the Dodd-Frank banking regulations, for supporting the war in Iraq and for supporting Supreme Court candidate Brett M. Kavanaugh.
"Trump me once, shame on me," said Carper, who said he would oppose The current appointment of Kavanaugh.
No Democratic senator has lost a primary since 2006, while Sen-a. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut responded to his defeat by organizing and winning an independent campaign. But the idea of building a liberal bridgehead in Delaware and letting other Democrats know that they could not take the votes of the militants for granted was appealing to the insurgents.
Some Ocasio-Cortez campaign staff traveled to Delaware in July. After the August 7th primary in Michigan, when the Liberal candidate Abdul El-Sayed failed, his digital director, Claire Sandberg, was heading toward the $ 100,000 independent expense, paid by the Working Families Party based at New York.
The first election that weighed on the Delaware Democrats occurred in 2010. This is the year when Mike Castle, a moderate Republican who ran in the Senate, was defeated by Conservative Christine O'Donnell. O'Donnell, a prey to scandal, then lost to Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D), opposing a national trend that year in favor of Republicans.
Harris and her supporters insisted she would take the seat of the Democrats in November, highlighting the blue slope of Delaware – Donald Trump winning only 41.7% of the state vote – and Republican polls that the far ahead of their candidates. According to Democratic activists, the possibility of electing the first black homosexual senator in the state would also have attracted donors and activists who otherwise ignored the race or overtaken Carper.
"The DNC would say," We are worried, "admitted Harris," but what's wonderful about Delaware is that we're small, we talk to each other, and we have a formula to get people to urns. "
The Republicans, who were hoping that Carper would retire this year, had themselves a controversy between PayPal's former director, Gene Truono, and Arlett, who ran Trump's campaign in the state.
The GOP race did not receive the same attention – the candidates spent less than $ 300,000 combined on the primary – but turned in nastiness. Asked by the state's largest newspaper, the News Journal, the biggest difference between the two campaigns was "I'm married to a woman and that's not the case".
Truono is openly gay – and won the newspaper's approval. But he received only 28% of the vote on Thursday.
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