John Delaney (Maryland politician)

Early life and education

Delaney grew up in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey, the son of Elaine (Rowe) and Jack Delaney, an electrician. He has Irish ancestry. Scholarships helped him attend college thanks to his father’s labor union (IBEW Local 164) as well as the American Legion, VFW, and the Lions Club. He is a graduate of Columbia University and Georgetown University Law Center. In February 2015, Delaney received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.

Business career

Delaney has co-founded two companies, both of which are publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. He has won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2004.

In 1993, he co-founded Health Care Financial Partners, to make loans available to smaller-sized health care service providers purportedly ignored by larger banks. HCFP became public in 1996, and became an NYSE company in 1998.

In 2000, Delaney co-founded CapitalSource, a commercial lender headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland; the company provided capital to roughly 5,000 small and mid-size businesses before his departure. In 2010, during Delaney’s tenure as CEO, CapitalSource was awarded a Bank Enterprise Award from the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund by the U.S. Treasury Department for its investment in low-income and economically distressed communities. In 2005, CapitalSource was named one of Washingtonian Magazine’s best places to work for its company culture and employee benefits.

CapitalSource continued to be publicly traded on the NYSE after Delaney's election, making him the only former CEO of a publicly traded company serving in the 113th United States Congress. In 2014, the lender was absorbed by PacWest Bancorp.

2012 election

After redistricting, Delaney decided to run for the newly redrawn 6th District against 10-term Republican incumbent Roscoe Bartlett. The district had long been a Republican stronghold, but it had been significantly reconfigured. The Maryland General Assembly shifted heavily Republican Carroll County and a mostly Republican section of Frederick County to the heavily Democratic 8th district. It shifted Republican-tilting sections of Harford and Baltimore counties into the already heavily Republican 1st district. Taking their place was a heavily Democratic spur of western Montgomery County, which ended just two blocks from Delaney's home in Potomac.

On paper, this dramatically altered the district's demographics, turning it from a heavily Republican district into a Democratic-leaning district. While John McCain carried the 6th with 57 percent of the vote in 2008, Barack Obama would have carried the new 6th with 56 percent. The shifts were quite controversial, as Republicans accused Democrats of shifting district boundaries in their favor, and former Governor Martin O'Malley now admits the redrawn districts would favor Democrats. "That was my hope," O'Malley told attorneys in a deposition. "It was also my intent to create … a district where the people would be more likely to elect a Democrat than a Republican."

During the primary, Delaney was endorsed by former President Bill Clinton, U.S. Congresswoman Donna Edwards, Comptroller Peter Franchot, the Washington Post, and the Gazette.

On April 3, 2012, Delaney won the five-candidate Democratic primary field with 54% of the vote. The next closest opponent, State Senator Robert J. Garagiola, received 29% of the vote, 25 points behind Delaney.

In the November 6, 2012 general election, Delaney defeated Bartlett by 59%-38%, a 21-point margin. He won mostly on the strength of a nearly 56,000-vote margin in Montgomery County, which accounted for almost all of the overall margin of 58,900 votes.

2014 election

Delaney faced a closer-than-expected contest for reelection against Republican Dan Bongino, the Republican candidate for Senate in 2012. He ultimately won by just over 2,200 votes, due mainly to swamping Bongino in the Montgomery County portion of the district by over 20,500 votes. Larry Hogan carried the district in his successful run for governor.

2016 election

Delaney won a third term in 2016, taking 56 percent of the vote to Republican Amie Hoeber's 40 percent.

Tenure

Since his election to Congress, Delaney introduced legislation to end partisan gerrymandering. The Open Our Democracy Act would appoint independent redistricting commissions nationwide to end partisan gerrymandering, make Election Day a federal holiday and create an open top-two primary system.

Delaney was ranked as the 53rd most bipartisan member of the U.S. House of Representatives during the 114th United States Congress (and the most bipartisan member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Maryland) in the Bipartisan Index created by The Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy that ranks members of the United States Congress by their degree of bipartisanship (by measuring the frequency each member's bills attract co-sponsors from the opposite party and each member's co-sponsorship of bills by members of the opposite party). In 2015, a similar ranking by the nonpartisan site GovTrack ranked Delaney third highest for bipartisanship among all House Democrats.

2020 presidential bid

Despite a rumored bid to run against incumbent governor Larry Hogan in 2018, Delaney plans to bypass the 2018 elections altogether. On July 28, 2017, Delaney announced he is running for president in 2020 in a Washington Post op-ed.

Committee assignments

Legislation sponsored

Key legislation which Delaney has sponsored:

Personal life

Delaney and his wife April (née McClain) met at Georgetown University Law Center and have four daughters. His wife is the Washington, D.C. Director for Common Sense Media, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating families on social media. Two of his daughters attend Northwestern University.

He was a member of the Board of Directors of several organizations: St. Patrick's Episcopal Day School (Chairman), Georgetown University, National Symphony Orchestra, and the International Center for Research on Women.