Blunt Rochester makes it official: She’s running for Senate
Walking slowly through the dramatically lit aisles of Philadelphia’s Bright Hope Baptist Church her family is well acquainted with, soft, jazzy piano music playing in the background, Delaware’s lone U.S.
Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester announced that she is running for Senate, hoping to take over the seat her mentor Tom Carper is leaving.
Her guiding principle? Bright hope. Just like the church’s. Just like the country’s. “Bright hope,” Blunt Rochester said, “keeps America forward and it kept me going through my own darkness.” That darkness included her husband’s death because of a blood clot, which she said inspired her to run for Congress. “You gotta get your mind right,” he told her. “So I did,” Blunt Rochester said in the video. “I decided to run for Congress.” Carper announced his retirement at a press conference on May 22 and all but endorsed Blunt Rochester for Senate. “I spoke with her this morning, I said, ‘You’ve been patient, waiting for me to get out of the way, and I’m going to get out of the way, and I hope you run, and I hope you’ll let me support you in that mission,’” Carper said with a laugh. “And she said, ‘Yes I will let you support me.’ And so I’m going to.’” Now that she officially announced her run, two days after Juneteenth, her former mentor endorsed her in a statement. “She is just the kind of leader that we’ll need in the U.S.
Senate in the days ahead, and she will make us proud,” Carper wrote, recalling the first time he met her. “Indeed, she already has!” Rochester holds up a scarf with a copy of her great-great-great grandfather’s Georgia voter registration oath from 1867 in the video.
