U.S. Rep Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Philly native, is poised to be Delaware’s first Black female senator

A lot of Americans first saw U.S. Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester on Jan. 6, 2021. During a live broadcast on CBS, she was seen crouching behind a wall next to fellow lawmakers, eyes squeezed shut, voice rising in prayer inside the U.S. Capitol as it was besieged by a pro-Donald Trump mob.

In that video, she can be heard saying all things work together for good and calling on God for peace and protection.

Nearly four years later, Blunt Rochester is poised to become Delaware’s first female and first Black senator. It will not be the first time she made history in the blue state. In 2016, she became Delaware’s first female and first Black congressperson after winning a crowded Democratic primary. She has won every election since.

“I truly believe that seeing each other and really hearing each other and problem-solving together brings that lasting change,” she said in a recent interview.

Following her experience on Jan. 6, Blunt Rochester felt emboldened to protect voting rights and democracy, something that was already dear to her. That day, she had with her a scarf printed with the document her great-great-great-grandfather, who was formerly enslaved, signed to vote in 1867.

“I want to fight for democracy because I was one of the people trapped up in the gallery on Jan. 6,” she said. “I saw how close we were to losing it.”

As when she carried her three-times-great-grandfather’s voting oath, Blunt Rochester launched her senatorial campaign honoring her ancestors.

Her 3½-minute video announcing her candidacy for senator in Delaware, using the slogan “bright hope,” was filmed in Philadelphia’s Bright Hope Baptist Church, its pews highlighted in hues from stained glass and sunrays. Blunt Rochester’s family attended Bright Hope Baptist Church, now at 12th and Oxford Streets in North Philadelphia, for generations.

Blunt Rochester was born in the city, where her father, the late Ted Blunt, worked in youth gang intervention. In 1969, when she was about 7, the family moved to Wilmington, when her dad got a job leading a nonprofit there. Ted Blunt went on to serve on the Wilmington City Council for nearly 25 years.

Blunt Rochester attended Villanova University and the University of Delaware before marrying and leaving school to follow her first husband to Europe, where he played professional basketball. She received her bachelor’s degree in international relations from Fairleigh Dickinson University.

She got her start in politics as an intern for Sen. Tom Carper (D., Del.) when he was a congressman in 1989.

Carper promoted Blunt Rochester to constituent services caseworker, later taking her with him to his governor’s office. She became the deputy secretary of the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services by 1993 and Delaware’s first female and first Black labor secretary in 1998. She was 36. Before her 40th birthday, Blunt Rochester was appointed to manage Delaware’s workforce as state personnel director.

More than 25 years after her internship, Blunt Rochester ran for office, at Carper’s relentless urging. He suggested Wilmington mayor. She said she wanted to be a congresswoman instead, he remembered.

“And you know what?” said Carper, who has been a visible supporter of Blunt Rochester as she now runs to succeed him in the Senate. “She is.”

Over the course of her life, she moved to two foreign lands for love. The first of her two children was born in Paris during her first marriage. In her second marriage, to Charles Rochester, whom she calls the love of her life, Blunt Rochester uprooted the career she’d built in Delaware — which included time as the CEO of the Metropolitan Wilmington Urban League — to move with her husband to China in 2007. There, she cowrote a book, Thrive, that profiled women who moved abroad on behalf of their spouses.

After the couple returned to the States, her husband died unexpectedly in 2014.

“After Charles’ passing, I said to myself, I have nothing to lose and everything to give,” Blunt Rochester said. It was then that she decided to run for Congress.

On a recent sunny day, Blunt Rochester, wearing a long, beige, hooded all-weather coat, joined Carper for a news conference marking the reopening of Delaware’s St. Georges Bridge.

The candidate for Senate floated around the swaying bridge, smiling with every muscle and laughing with 8-year-old Cub Scouts, before underscoring the importance of the bridge to commerce.

The bridge project, she said, “shows how strong we are when we do things together … as Democrats, Republicans, independents, Americans.”

As a congresswoman, she introduced the bipartisan “Promoting Resilient Supply Chains Act,” which passed the House in May. Others in the package of eight economic bills aimed at improving things like workforce development and affordable housing allocated varying levels of funding to different initiatives in Delaware, but did not pass out of committee.

Blunt Rochester has also taken up issues that are personal to her, like Black women’s maternal health, created a bipartisan caucus for tech-focused workforce preparation, and wants to start what she calls “a menopause movement.”

She’s an abortion-rights advocate and introduced a criminal justice reform bill to seal the records of people with low-level drug offenses.

She’s especially proud of her effort, along with Carper and Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.), to invest in upgrading Delaware’s water infrastructure and the real-life effects of those improvements.

“We can’t afford to go backwards,” she said. “We can’t afford it economically, internationally, even for our own basic rights and freedoms.”

The first question a reporter asked Carper when he announced his retirement at a news conference in May of last year was who he wanted to replace him.

“We love Lisa,” he said, “and I spoke with her this morning. I said, ‘You’ve been patient, waiting for me to get out of the way, and I’m gonna get out of the way.’”

Blunt Rochester remembered the call she said took place an hour before Carper’s retirement presser.

“I picked up, I said hello, and he didn’t even say hello. He just said, ‘I’m retiring,’” she said. On that call, he told her, “‘I think you should run for this seat.’ And so that was him doing the pitch.”

Glynda C. Carr is the CEO of Higher Heights, an organization she cofounded in 2011 to help make it easier for Black women to run for office. Carr said the Senate is “a logical next step” for Blunt Rochester.

“She’s not the person you see on network television every day, but here’s a woman who’s really built power over the years,” Carr said. “She really has strong political relationships across this country that are important … to be able to advocate for issues that her state and the broader constituency care about.”

Blunt Rochester’s family has been connected to President Joe Biden’s for decades, for instance. One of her two sisters worked in Biden’s Senate office, and the president campaigned alongside her father.

“I think it became a more close-knit thing when Beau [Biden] ran for office and our family was out there with him, canvassing,” Blunt Rochester said. When Beau Biden, the president’s older son, died of brain cancer in 2015, Blunt Rochester said, “we stood on line for five hours, just to go and hug them, you know, hug the family and say we’re here.”

In January, when Blunt Rochester’s father died of cancer, Biden and his wife, Jill, reciprocated.

“I had been really strong the whole time until he hugged me,” Blunt Rochester said of Biden’s visit. “[Y]ou could feel this warmth. Like I always say, he’s like the comforter-in-chief.”

Blunt Rochester served as a Biden campaign cochair and as a member of the committee to select his vice president, where she got to know Vice President Kamala Harris. In Congress, Blunt Rochester stuck with Biden once he was elected president in 2020, and voted with the president 100% of the time through 2022, according to an analysis of her congressional voting record by the website FiveThirtyEight that stops after that year.

Some people who know Blunt Rochester describe her as empathetic and genuine.

“She is a people-over-politics person,” said Jalyn Powell, 28, who interned in Blunt Rochester’s congressional office in 2018. When Powell ran for local office years later, Blunt Rochester canvassed for her. “It was a selfless act, just to show she cares.”

Raye Jones Avery, a retired nonprofit executive and longtime activist in the Wilmington area, worked with Blunt Rochester’s father and has known the congresswoman since she was in high school. She described her as compassionate. ”When she comes into a room, she brings joy with her,” she said. What people might not be able to see is Blunt Rochester’s strength, she added.

“She has the faith to step out in the middle of a storm and to be of service to others, not to wallow in her own grief,” Jones Avery said.

If elected senator, Blunt Rochester would not be alone. For the first time in history, she and Angela Alsobrooks, a Democrat from Maryland, are poised to become the first Black elected senators to enter the Senate together.

“It is a fact that when you have a diverse decision-making table, that decision-making group will make a better decision,” said Carr. “The 7% of Black women [in] this country deserve representation.”