Jeff Appelhans

Jeff Appelhans earned a high school diploma from William J. Palmer High School, a bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2000, a graduate degree from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs in 2006, and a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in 2018. His career experience includes working as a historian.[1]

Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

Girl dad of four; grandpa to another. Odometer just rolled over into year twenty-nine with my high school sweetheart. For twenty-six years I have taught, earned an MA focused on the American Constitution and a PhD focused on early American political and religious culture, and sat in positions of public trust at the highest levels. There is a qualified Delaware Democratic alternative who lives in Newark: somebody who loves his country and has a lot of p.o.’d dad/grandpa energy about the whole lot of ’em.Vote ’em out has worked for the last 250 years; if I fail you, don’t return me in six.By the end of May—bullets in the air during a “ceasefire,” an odious 1.776 billion fund looming, Flock cameras building a warrantless surveillance subscription service, continued genocide and a lack of will or PAC independence to say “enough is enough”—I had worked myself into the sense that I had to offer myself up for your consideration. Given the risks and costs, my family prayed a Novena and listened for “stop.” None came. It seemed immoral to do what I frankly wanted: live a small life and hang out with my granddaughter.I am part of the older edge of what millennials and Gen Z are calling a “lost generation”: people doing what institutions asked, grinding out a life, and finding that the bargain no longer matches the process or promise. We can fix that, and believe it or not, the AI crisis is going to help.My response is a rights-first campaign in a moment of power trampling people.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

Centrist spinelessness enabled Trumpism and Washington’s worst habit: combining powers that must remain separate to protect the people. I am running to cage pseudomonarchical behavior in the Constitution and restore the separation of powers, so no president can take our rights hostage to pressure Congress or the Court.

The resulting anti-social economy privatizes gain, isolates risk, socializes failures, and generally leaves people feeling small beneath billionaire dragons. The danger is bigger than who owns the means of production: workers can lose the leverage that made ownership worth fighting over. We need a pro-social democratic economy in which power answers to people and Americans share in the wealth their knowledge and labor create.The agents are built: IF COMPUTER, THEY CAN. We can’t push the river, but we can channel it: democracy decides who they serve. The Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission gives AI a national purpose and asks how to power it. UD is already at work through its Center for Composite Materials and First State AI Institute.

Importance is not entitlement. Creative destruction is real. Reliable, affordable energy is a right. A data center is not. Nobody expects Jean-Luc Picard to land the Enterprise, jack into Delaware’s grid, draw on our drinking water, and send us the bill. Communities should decide how shared energy and water are used—and what they get back. Humanists must legislate foundational values before Silicon Valley imposes others on us.Interests distort our democracy and values. Coons knowingly voted against advancing Bernie Sanders’s resolutions to block 1,000-pound bombs and bulldozers to Israel after Netanyahu’s government had impermissibly used hunger as a weapon. I would not have made that moral choice. No ally gets a blank check, and AIPAC’s is not the only Jewish message.

I will lock my money if elected, and this campaign is voter-funded: no PAC, party-committee, or other political-committee funds. I support Josh Hawley’s HONEST Act or stronger. Public office is a trust, not an investment strategy.

Getting sick should not mean bargaining alone. Pass the Break Up Big Medicine Act and Patients Before Monopolies Act; break insurer/PBM/provider/pharmacy choke points.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

[Rip out the insurer-and-PBM payer maze and make health care a right; overturn Citizens United because Wawa and Sheetz are not voters; protect lawful refusal of manifestly unlawful military orders; require Congress to authorize war; pass a Digital Privacy Amendment; expand the People’s House by law; reconcile the federal cannabis-law trapdoor; ban individual stock trading by federal officeholders; protect the right to remain human; and put Federal Reserve independence in the Constitution.

Bernie Sanders is right that concentrated AI wealth should produce a public return: give Americans a share of the machine. And the First Amendment and Article VI rule is simple: my faith is not Delaware’s veto. Protect every faith—and establish none.]

My answer starts with usable rights. Guarantee care; support S.3822, the Break Up Big Medicine Act, and S.4509, the Patients Before Monopolies Act; and break vertical choke points among insurers, PBMs, providers, and pharmacies. Overturn Citizens United and ban officeholder stock trading. Stop government from buying around warrants and private traffic in intimate data. Protect the First Amendment’s free-exercise and no-establishment promises. Give people notice, human appeal, worker voice, authorship protection, and a public return from AI. Use legislation where it works; pursue constitutional floors where health, privacy, democratic government, or lawful military duty should not depend on a temporary majority.

Who do you look up to? Whose example would you like to follow, and why?

Franklin, Jefferson, and Napoleon were radically different men, but each had a capacious mind that reached for unconventional combinations. Franklin helped create a subscription library and the learned society where I have engaged the work of leading thinkers past and present. Jefferson moved across law, architecture, science, religion, and republican government. Napoleon worked with astonishing intensity to replace the remnants of old-regime law and drive the Civil Code into being; its core remains French law today. I do not admire power for itself. I admire the nerve to imagine unconventional combinations, to build and rebuild—and judge the result by whether ordinary people inherit more freedom and room to act, and change course if not.

What characteristics or principles are most important for an elected official?

My motto is “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” Franklin proposed it; Jefferson adopted it. Madisonian lesson: distrust concentrated power, even with good intentions.

Rights are rights. Power must be divided, checked, and watched—whether it comes from government or concentrated wealth. Public office is a trust, not a brand. It demands courage, curiosity, candor, and care for the people who lent you authority.

As a historian, I have to tell the truth about America—even when it embarrasses my party. Competence means showing the method, admitting uncertainty, testing claims, and changing course with the evidence. Flip-flopping is one thing; when unintended consequences impinge on liberty, we must know when to patch it or rip it out.

What do you believe are the core responsibilities for someone elected to this office?

The primary responsibility is to the wellspring of power: the people themselves. They create the government and lend it authority.

A senator can help send other people’s children to war, bind the country through treaties, and confirm officials whose power will outlast the next election. That should make a person humble, not grand. The job is to investigate, deliberate, guard constitutional boundaries, and use what Delawareans endure as evidence of systems that need repair. Delay can deepen judgment; it cannot become an excuse for inertia.

What legacy would you like to leave?

Elected office is not a legacy project; it is a contract job entrusted by citizens. Jefferson proposed rotation in the Continental Congress in 1776. In 1787, amid Shays’s Rebellion, he wrote that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.”

We refresh liberty now not by storming the Capitol, but through peaceful elections, lawful protest, and constitutional accountability. That renewal applies to both incumbents. Tell the truth, do the work, protect rights, leave institutions stronger, and make room for another citizen. A Senate seat is not a possession. It is a six-year gig, one gig at a time.

What was your very first job? How long did you have it?

Dishwasher at Wade's Pancake House No. 2 starting at age 12 (parental letter qualified in CO at time) for $4.25/hr. About eight months; I quit when I got passed over for a promotion!

What is something that has been a struggle in your life?

The four or five once-in-a-lifetime economic crises since 9/11: but I'm gonna do something about the one on the horizon.

What do you perceive to be the United States' greatest challenges as a nation over the next decade?

Society is the people, come together. Our greatest challenge is that the economy has become anti-social: it is not concerned with the bulk of people living together in society, but atomistic and individualistic to a fault. It has to be hammered back into pro-social and democratic ends.

FDR’s Second Bill of Rights gives us a model and an answer to “too radical.” Rights on paper fail when a sick, indebted, surveilled, or precarious person must bargain alone with systems too large to challenge. The challenge is to cage Trumpism in the Constitution, make government capable of delivering rights, and rebuild a wage bargain in which work buys a life.

What qualities does the U.S. Senate possess that makes it unique as an institution?

The House follows public opinion; the presidency concentrates execution. In the Senate, equal state representation, six-year terms, individual leverage, and special constitutional duties meet. A Delaware senator represents about 1.06 million people; a California senator, 39.36 million. That gives a Delawarean unusual power to force scrutiny across state lines and borders—on appointments, treaties, war, markets, and technology. The Senate’s design can also shelter inertia and minority obstruction. The job fits my training: historians hold complex factors together and trace how choices become consequences. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson brought that long view to the presidency; I mean to put it to democratic use.

Do you believe that compromise is necessary or desirable for policymaking?

I will work with strange allies if the result puts rights first. If Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley can work together to break up concentrated medical power, good. If Warren and Bernie Moreno can protect Social Security without cutting earned benefits, good. That is not surrender; it is legislating. But I will not call a bad bill progress just because it is bipartisan. I will compromise on method, sequence, and coalition. I will not compromise the principles of American political philosophy—we are all, indeed, democratic republicans—nor my own.

What was the first historical event that happened in your lifetime that you remember?

Watching the Challenger explode on live TV in my classroom.

Campaign websiteAppelhans' campaign website stated the following:01 · S.1498Public office, public trust.Before taking office, I will remove individual securities, commodities, and similar covered instruments from the investment accounts I control. I will keep market exposure in diversified mutual funds and diversified ETFs, and I will support S.1498 or a successor congressional stock-ban bill.Close the revolving door. I will support a two-year ban on direct lobbying and a five-year ban on indirect lobbying after service for former members of Congress and senior congressional staff, and apply the same two-year and five-year restrictions to their spouses.02 · S.1506 · S.3822 · S.4509MEDICARE FOR ALL · BREAK UP BIG MEDICINEMedicare for All guarantees the care. Break Up Big Medicine breaks the choke points.03 · S.4825Let the public share AI's wealth.I agree with Sanders's principle that the public should share in wealth generated by AI. I will test S.4825's ownership, governance, effects on innovation, and distribution mechanics before endorsing the bill.04 · Social SecurityProtect Social Security without cutting benefits.I support Warren and Moreno's objective: remove the Social Security payroll-tax cap, extend solvency, and protect earned benefits without cuts. They are still writing the bill, and I will judge the text when introduced.— Jeff Appelhans' campaign website (September 11, 2026)Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.