Lisa Blunt Rochester

In 2017 Lisa Blunt Rochester became the first woman and the first person of color to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the state of Delaware. She was fulfilling a promise 150 years in the making. In 1867 Blunt Rochester’s formerly enslaved great-great-great-grandfather earned the right to vote in Georgia. When Blunt Rochester was sworn in to Congress, she held a scarf that reproduced the document he had marked with an X to assert that right. In 2024, the Democrat again made history, becoming her state’s first Black senator. Before 2024, three Black women had served in the U.S. Senate.

Early life

Lisa LaTrelle Blunt was born in Philadelphia in 1962 and moved with her parents to Delaware when she was seven years old. Her father, Ted Blunt, worked as a school administrator before being elected to the Wilmington City Council and then becoming city council president. Her mother, Alice LaTrelle Blunt, worked as a retail clerk in a department store. She has two sisters, Thea Blunt-Fowler and Marla Blunt-Carter.

Lisa Blunt was a good student, attending Catholic schools for middle and high school. In high school she worked first at McDonald’s and then the store where her mother worked. But she got her introduction to politics helping her dad with his city council campaigns. “I was no stranger to running for office, even as a kid, and I think it helped me immensely on the trail,” she told Delaware Today about her 2016 congressional campaign.

She went to Villanova University and then transferred to the University of Delaware during her sophomore year because of the cost. But she soon left college altogether to marry basketball player Alex Bradley, whom she had met at Villanova. He was playing in European leagues, and the couple lived in Italy and France for a number of years.

Upon returning to the United States, she earned a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Farleigh Dickinson University in 1985 and a master’s degree in urban affairs and public policy from the University of Delaware in 2003.

The beginnings of a political career

In 1988 Blunt Bradley was the mother of a young son and was pregnant with the couple’s second child when she attended a town hall hosted by Delaware Rep. Tom Carper. Aware of her roots as the daughter of a well-known Wilmington politician and undaunted by having a toddler in tow, she struck up a conversation with Carper and shortly thereafter was working for him as an intern. When Carper became governor of Delaware in 1993 Blunt Bradley served in a number of roles in his administration, including leading the state’s labor department. In 2003 she and Alex Bradley divorced, and in 2004 she became chief executive of the Metropolitan Wilmington Urban League.

An international diversion and tragedy

In 2006 she married Charles Rochester, a businessman who was working in China. The couple spent seven years living in China, during which time she cowrote Thrive: Thirty-four Women, Eighteen Countries, One Goal (2010), which tells the story of women from around the world who came to China and found success. The couple moved back to the United States, and in 2014 Charles Rochester, whom Lisa Blunt Rochester has called “the love of my life,” died after a ruptured Achilles tendon led to blood clots in his heart and lungs.

Blunt Rochester moved back to Delaware and by her own admission was lost in grief and questioning her purpose in life. But a scene she witnessed in a grocery store, where a father had to put back a bunch of grapes because they cost too much, shook her from her malaise and reminded her of her past public service. “I just decided, I’m going to run. Instead of sit back and complain, I’m going to step up,” she told USA Today in 2017.

Serving in Congress

In Blunt Rochester’s first run for Congress in 2016, she faced a crowded field of opponents in the Democratic primary but emerged victorious before soundly beating her Republican challenger in the reliably Democratic state. Voters returned her to office in landslides in 2018, 2020, and 2022.

She has served on the Energy and Commerce and Agriculture committees while in Congress and worked on legislation as part of the Congressional Progressive Caucus on criminal justice reforms. She is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. She also honored her late husband by introducing legislation to increase awareness about the dangers of blood clots. Her voting record has been reliably Democratic, including voting twice to impeach U.S. Pres. Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021. She voted to support U.S. aid in the wake of the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, but she voted against subsequent aid packages.

Blunt Rochester gained national attention during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. As members of Congress hid in a secure location while rioters stormed the building, Blunt Rochester noticed that some of her colleagues didn’t have masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. She found extra masks and offered them to her colleagues; some, including Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, refused to take one.

After four terms in the House of Representatives, Blunt Rochester announced in June 2023 that she would seek the seat that her former boss, Carper, was vacating. The notion of history coming full circle was not lost on Carper. The woman who had approached him for an internship and followed him to the governor’s mansion and the House now had the chance to take his seat in the Senate. On the day of his retirement announcement several weeks earlier, he told reporters, “I spoke with [Lisa] this morning and I said you’ve been patiently waiting for me to get out the way, and I’m gonna get out of the way.”

Blunt Rochester ran unopposed in the Democratic primary and faces Republican businessman Eric Hansen in the general election. Of her reasons for running for the Senate, Blunt Rochester told The Washington Post in 2024, “We’re here for a minute. What did you do with it? So this is what I’m doing with it.”

With her election Blunt Rochester will join Angela Alsobrooks, who won election in 2024 to the Senate from Maryland in the Senate. When Blunt Rochester and Alsobrooks are sworn in in 2025, it will mark the first time two Black women have served together in the U.S. Senate. The other Black women to serve in the Senate have been Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, who became the first Black woman senator in 1993; Vice Pres. Kamala Harris, who represented California in the Senate beginning in 2017 before becoming vice president in 2021; and Laphonza Butler of California, who was appointed to the Senate in 2023.