Chris Coons

Christopher Andrew Coons (born September 9, 1963) is an American politician and lawyer serving as the senior United States senator from Delaware, a seat he has held since 2010. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as the county executive of New Castle County from 2005 to 2010.

Raised in Hockessin, Delaware, Coons graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He received graduate degrees from Yale Divinity School and Yale Law School. He went to work as a volunteer relief worker in Kenya, where he had taken classes at the University of Nairobi, later returning to the U.S. to work for the Coalition for the Homeless in New York. He spent some time as a legal clerk in New York before returning to Delaware in 1996, where he spent eight years as in-house counsel for a materials manufacturing company. In the interim he worked for several nonprofit organizations.

Coons served as president of the New Castle County Council from 2001 to 2005 and county executive of New Castle County from 2005 to 2010. He balanced the county budget with a surplus in fiscal year 2010 by cutting spending and raising taxes, and the county maintained a AAA bond rating. Coons contested the 2010 Senate special election for Delaware. He defeated the Republican nominee, Christine O'Donnell, to succeed Ted Kaufman, who had been appointed to the seat when Joe Biden resigned to become Vice President of the United States. He was elected to a full term in 2014. Coons is the vice chair of the Senate Ethics Committee, having chaired the committee from 2021 to 2025. His other committee assignments include Appropriations, Foreign Relations, Judiciary, and Small Business and Entrepreneurship. He previously served as ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs and the Judiciary Subcommittee on Bankruptcy and the Courts.

Coons co-chaired the 2017 and 2019 National Prayer Breakfasts and co-chairs the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast. The New York Times called him an "effective" emissary of Joe Biden to former and current Republican lawmakers in Biden's 2020 campaign for president.

Coons was born on September 9, 1963, in Greenwich, Connecticut, the son of Sarah Louise "Sally" (née Ives) and Kenelm Winslow "Ken" Coons. His ancestry includes English and Irish. Coons has said that his last name was spelled "Kuntz" when his family immigrated to the United States. He grew up in Hockessin, Delaware, where he attended Yorklyn Elementary School and H. B. DuPont Middle School. His parents struggled financially and divorced in the mid-1970s. He and his two brothers lived with their mother for a few years until 1977, when his mother married Robert W. Gore, the president of W. L. Gore and Associates.

Coons graduated from the private Tower Hill School and then Amherst College in 1985 with a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry and political science. In college, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Sigma chapter) and a U.S. Senate intern. In 1983, Coons was awarded a Truman Scholarship. During his junior year of college, he studied at the University of Nairobi in Kenya through St. Lawrence University's Kenya Semester Program. In 1992, he earned a master's degree in ethics from Yale Divinity School and a J.D. degree from Yale Law School. In 2018, Delaware State University awarded Coons an honorary doctorate in humane letters.

After college, Coons worked in Washington, D.C., for the Investor Responsibility Research Center, where he wrote a book on South Africa and the U.S. divestment movement. He then worked as a volunteer for the South African Council of Churches and as a relief worker in Kenya, before returning to the U.S. to work for the National Coalition for the Homeless in New York. In 1992, he earned a J.D. degree from Yale Law School, and a master's degree in ethics from Yale Divinity School.

Coons clerked for Judge Jane Richards Roth on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and then worked for the National "I Have a Dream" Foundation in New York. After returning to Delaware in 1996, Coons began his eight-year career as in-house counsel for W.L. Gore & Associates, Inc., Newark, Delaware-based makers of Gore-Tex fabrics and other high-tech materials. There he was responsible for the ethics training program, federal government relations, e-commerce legal work, and for general commercial contracting.

He has also worked for several nonprofits, including the Coalition for the Homeless, the education-oriented "I Have a Dream" Foundation, and the South African Council of Churches. Coons has served on several boards including First State Innovation, the Bear/Glasgow Boys & Girls Club, and the Delaware College of Art & Design.

Coons is on the Board of Selectors of Jefferson Awards for Public Service.

Coons first became involved in politics working on behalf of Republican politicians. As a 17-year-old, in 1980, he independently campaigned for Ronald Reagan's presidential run. He also worked on Bill Roth's U.S. Senate campaign in 1982. During college, he switched from being a Republican to a Democrat and in 1988, Coons became the issues director for the U.S. Senate campaign of Democratic Delaware Lt. Gov. Shien Biau Woo. He was a delegate from Wilmington to the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He also interned in the Senate office of Joe Biden, whose seat he would later hold in the Senate.

Coons was first elected to office in 2000, as president of the New Castle County Council. He served four years before being elected county executive in 2004. He was the New Castle County Democratic Party's endorsed candidate in 2008 and re-nominated by the party on September 9, 2008. Coons was reelected on November 4, 2008, unopposed in the general election. In his six years in office as county executive, Coons balanced the budget with a surplus in fiscal year 2010 by cutting spending and raising taxes. As New Castle county executive, Coons raised taxes despite having campaigned on a promise not to increase them. New Castle County maintained a AAA bond rating throughout his tenure.

Coons ran in the 2010 special election for the U.S. Senate seat then held by Democrat Ted Kaufman, who was appointed after Joe Biden resigned to take office as vice president. Kaufman had been appointed as a placeholder, and did not run in the special election. Coons was unopposed in the Democratic primary, and expected to face Republican Congressman and former Governor Mike Castle in the general election. Coons was considered a decided underdog due to Castle's moderate profile and longstanding popularity in the state, but the dynamics of the race significantly altered when Christine O'Donnell, a Tea Party Republican who had lost to Biden in 2008 and who was strongly opposed by the GOP establishment, upset Castle in the Republican primary.

In the first post-primary polls, Rasmussen Reports showed Coons with a double-digit lead over O'Donnell, describing this as a "remarkable turnaround" given that the race had leaned Republican before O'Donnell's primary victory. In the first week of October, Fairleigh Dickinson University's PublicMind Poll showed Coons with a 17-point lead, 53%–36%, over O'Donnell, and that 85% of self-identified Democratic voters had united behind Coons, while only 68% of Republican voters endorsed O'Donnell. Days before the election, a second Fairleigh Dickinson poll showed Coons leading 57% to 36% among likely voters, and 72% to 20% among voters who described themselves as moderates. As polls closed at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, multiple news sources announced that Coons had defeated O'Donnell based on exit poll data. Final results gave Coons close to a 17-point margin over O'Donnell, with 56.6% of the vote to her 40%.

During the campaign, Coons became embroiled in controversy over an article he wrote in 1985 for his college newspaper: "Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist". In it, he described how, on a college trip to Kenya, hearing wealthy Africans disparaging their country's poor while studying under a "bright and eloquent Marxist professor" at the University of Nairobi helped transform him from a Republican to what Fox News called a "Democrat suspicious of America's power and ideals". Coons campaign spokesman Dave Hoffman said the article's title was a humorous takeoff on a joke Coons's college friends had made about how his time outside the country had affected his outlook. "After witnessing crushing poverty and the consequences of the Reagan Administration's 'constructive engagement' with the South African apartheid regime, he rethought his political views, returned to the America he loved and proudly registered as a Democrat", Hoffman said in a statement to Politico.

According to Fox News, Coons was "targeted by Republicans" over the 25-year-old piece, and then-Senate-Majority-Leader Harry Reid's attempt to defend Coons by calling him "my pet" might have done more harm than good. Coons downplayed the article, as well as controversial past statements by O'Donnell, saying that voters were interested in current issues such as job creation and the national debt and not "statements that either of us made 20 or 30 years ago". Writing in Slate, David Weigel called Coons "boring" and noted that his campaign ads failed to identify him as a Democrat, but opined, "If the Tea Party Express slings the 'bearded Marxist' nonsense, I doubt it will work."

O'Donnell also attracted significant controversy; she embellished her academic record on several occasions, and after comedian Bill Maher aired a video clip of her admitting that she had "dabbled in witchcraft" while in high school, her campaign aired a widely mocked television ad that began with her saying "I am not a witch."

The American Conservative Union gave Coons a 3% lifetime conservative rating in 2020. Coons has been described as a pro-Israel centrist.

Coons supported Roe v. Wade and believes abortion should remain legal throughout the country. In 2015, he signed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt that urged the Court to step in to prevent states from enacting laws that restrict access to abortion. Coons described the June 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade as taking away "the fundamental freedom for women to make their own choices about their body and their future."

In June 2019, Coons and 18 other Democratic senators sent USDA Inspector General Phyllis K. Fong a letter requesting that she investigate USDA instances of retaliation and political decision-making and asserting that not to conduct an investigation would mean these "actions could be perceived as a part of this administration's broader pattern of not only discounting the value of federal employees, but suppressing, undermining, discounting, and wholesale ignoring scientific data produced by their own qualified scientists."

In April 2019, Coons was one of 12 senators to sign a bipartisan letter to top senators on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development advocating that the Energy Department be granted maximum funding for carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS), arguing that investment in viable options to capture carbon emissions could stimulate American job growth and expressing disagreement with Trump's 2020 budget request to combine the two federal programs that include carbon capture research. Coons was revealed in a sting operation by Greenpeace to be a target for ExxonMobil in efforts to weaken the climate regulations in President Biden's INVEST in America Act. In June 2023, Coons was the primary sponsor of the PROVE IT Act, which would direct the Department of Energy to collect data on the greenhouse gas intensity of certain goods made in the United States and other countries, data that could enable climate-focused trade policy addressing international disparities in environmental standards. He was joined by lead Republican sponsor Kevin Cramer.

As of 2010, Coons had a "F" grade from the National Rifle Association (NRA) due to his stance on gun control. In 2015, he and 23 other Democratic senators signed a letter to Obama asking him to take executive action on gun control in the wake of the Umpqua Community College shooting. Coons supported the Feinstein Amendment, which sought to ban known and suspected terrorists from buying firearms. The next year, he participated in the Chris Murphy gun control filibuster.

"A Bipartisan Foreign Policy Is Still Possible", Foreign Affairs, October 7, 2020

Coons is married to Annie Coons, née Lingenfelter. They have three children, twins Mike and Jack, and daughter Maggie, and they live in Wilmington, Delaware. Coons is Presbyterian, his wife is Catholic, and they attend St. Ann Catholic Church in the city. Coons describes himself as "someone who is, privately, fairly religious," though he has never thought "that needs to be a big part of [campaigning]."

In 1999, he was awarded the Governor's Outstanding Volunteer Award for his work with the "I Have a Dream" Foundation, the Governor's Mentoring Council, and the United Way of Delaware.