Chris Coons

Chris Coons (born September 9, 1963, Greenwich, Connecticut, U.S.) is an American politician who was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in 2010 and began representing Delaware later that year.

Coons grew up in Hockessin, a suburb of Wilmington, Delaware. After attending preparatory school, he went to Amherst College, where he received a bachelor’s degree in political science and chemistry in 1985. A recipient of a Truman scholarship, Coons spent his junior year in Kenya, taking courses at the University of Nairobi. Coons later enrolled at Yale University and earned (1992) both a master’s degree in religion from the Yale Divinity School and a doctorate in jurisprudence from Yale Law School.

As a teenager, Coons worked on the 1980 presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan and the 1982 senatorial campaign of Delaware’s William Roth; both of the candidates were Republicans. In the mid-1980s, however, Coons moved to the Democratic Party. In 1996, after having worked in South Africa and for a nonprofit organization concerned with caring for the homeless, he became legal counsel to a Delaware textile manufacturer. Also that year he married Annie Lingenfelter, and the couple later had three children.

Coons’s political career began in 2000, when he was elected to the New Castle County Council in Delaware. He became county executive in 2005, serving until 2010. That year he entered a special electoral race to fill a U.S. Senate seat and defeated controversial Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell by almost 17 points.

After taking office in November 2010, Coons developed a reputation as a moderate Democrat, supporting abortion rights, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and other broadly accepted party positions while breaking with them, and Pres. Barack Obama, on occasion. Much of his criticism of the Obama administration focused on foreign policy, notably its response to the Syrian Civil War. Coons was instrumental in the passage of several pieces of legislation protecting women’s and children’s rights. While on the Senate Appropriations Committee, he dedicated himself to programs for job creation and the revitalization of domestic manufacturing.