A Heat-Check for Progressive Democrats

Delaware isn’t exactly where one goes looking for progressive insurgencies. The state’s most famous politician is Joe Biden, a New Democrat who might be the second-best national example of the “triangulation” era of the party’s evolution, after Bill Clinton. Senator Chris Coons once worked for Ronald Reagan, and has garnered a reputation in the upper chamber as an aisle-crossing dealmaker. His partner in the Senate, Tom Carper, was a staunch ally of Biden’s in the New Democrat takeover in the 1990s, and was one of the founders of the now-defunct Moderate Dems Working Group. If there’s a place where progressive energy across the country might not be expected to have much truck, it’s this bastion of moderateness.

Kerri Evelyn Harris hopes that assumption is wrong.

Just two days after Ayanna Pressley in the Democratic primary in Massachusetts’s Seventh District, Harris is hoping that whatever hidden energies might have been unlocked by Pressley can help buoy her challenge to Carper. “What an exciting moment,” Harris told me by phone Wednesday. “It’s just a completely different feeling. We know that the momentum is there.”