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Is mistrust of ‘big pharma’ enough to help unseat a Democratic stalwart in Congress?

Kerri Evelyn Harris is gunning for Tom Carper's Senate seat in Delaware — and challenging the Democratic party line on drug prices and big pharma while she does it.

WILMINGTON, Del. — Three miles from the sprawling U.S. campus of the pharmaceutical giant Astrazeneca, Kerri Evelyn Harris was campaigning to unseat the man who put it there.

Some 200 people had crammed into folding chairs, stood along walls, and spilled into hallways of a community center for a look at the candidate mounting a long-shot bid to unseat Sen. Tom Carper, an 18-year-incumbent, in the state’s Democratic Senate primary this Thursday.

Harris’s go-to campaign topics include drug pricing, special interests, the opioid crisis — and what she views as the throughline joining all three: the pharmaceutical industry.

The race, broadly, is emblematic of the Democratic Party’s struggle to become more inclusive — Harris is a queer biracial woman in her 30s, Carper a straight white man in his 70s. But Harris, an Air Force veteran and community organizer, is among a

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