It doesn’t take long for Delaware to work its magic on new residents. Back in 2004, when I was just five years old, my family moved from Oklahoma to Delaware for my dad to accept a position as a cello professor at the University of Delaware. The move coincided with an unfortunate election year as my dad — a progressive Democrat and Howard Dean supporter — had to watch his preferred candidates wipe out in the primary and general elections within just a few months.

To help feel a little bit less crazy in a country that seemed to be losing its mind, he attended a few meetings of a new organization: the Progressive Democrats for Delaware. It was there that he met a former machinist and recently unsuccessful local candidate named John Kowalko. Impressed by his platform, when Kowalko decided to run again in 2006, my dad did some phone banking for him and was excited when the insurgent pulled off an upset victory over a 12-year Republican incumbent in the state House of Representatives that November.

I can’t quite remember when I personally met John Kowalko. But as soon as I began to get involved in electoral politics after 2016, it became impossible to not know him. Tending my own political wounds after primary and general presidential defeats, Kowalko appeared almost as the Delaware Bernie Sanders — the curmudgeonly old progressive with a shock of crazy white hair. However, the more I got involved and the more I got to know him, the more I saw something deeper than that.

He taught us how to fight

You don’t get men like John Kowalko much anymore. He had impeccable blue collar credentials: Raised in Philadelphia to a working-class Polish family, he spent his entire career working as a mechanic, which brought him to Delaware to work for the refinery. But despite the political leanings of many others in that profession, he became a committed liberal in not just the areas of union rights and economic justice — though he championed these issues as well — but especially in environmental justice, government transparency, and police reform. Even before he ran for office, he had embedded himself in a variety of different organizations fighting for this whole range of issues and made himself an expert in each of them. It is fitting that he ended up representing a district evenly split between the old Chrysler Plant and the University of Delaware; he could represent both with full authenticity. 

Once in office, Rep. Kowalko made an impact across a whole score of different issues both inside and outside the legislature: 

• He introduced legislation creating an inspector general’s office.
• He sought to protect the rights and pay of state workers when they were under threat.
• He looked to expand offshore wind to bring about a green energy transition.
• He introduced the first universal health care legislation in Delaware history. 
• Despite the deep influence corporations have on Delaware’s legislature, Kowalko constantly challenged our secrecy and leniency towards corporations, serving as a lone voice on many bills and amendments. 

In an age where he was a lonely progressive voice in the legislature, few of these bills became law, but they could never be ignored.

Just as important as his traditional legislative work was what he was able to do outside of the legislature. John Kowalko taught us how to fight. By the time he took office in 2006, the bipartisan “Delaware Way” consensus had just passed its thirtieth birthday, and the way of doing politics was pretty well established. On the surface, Delaware Way politics are based on compromise and often lean on friendships to achieve goals. In Dover, legislators are told to stick to their lane, not make waves, and focus on just building relationships within the building. It’s a perfectly valid strategy for when you’re just trying to make small changes, but Rep. Kowalko reintroduced tactics that expanded the imagination for what a public servant could really do.

He would attend Public Service Commission meetings to protest against rate hikes, he would protest against projects like the Newark power plant, and he would even use his position to write entire budgets that showed how we could pay workers what they were worth without going into debt. Perhaps the tactic closest to my heart was his role in helping bring the Working Families Party to Delaware back in 2006, despite the organization’s dissolution only a few years later.

These tactics did not earn Rep. Kowalko many friends in the legislature. After a variety of these tactics and a formal challenge to leadership, he was removed from many of his committee positions in 2013 and 2015, and for the remainder of his tenure his bills were almost uniformly kept from receiving a vote. He exposed the Delaware Way for what it is: A code of corporate conformity to be protected by any means necessary. Still, he kept going; introducing bills and raising hell. His work at exposing Delaware’s corporate secrecy was a huge part in the research of What’s the Matter With Delaware in 2022, which more broadly revealed to the world what many experts already knew: our system was broken not just for Delaware, but for the entire world. Fittingly, the book was published just a month before his retirement.

A powerful legacy

I began to interact with Rep. Kowalko more again in 2019 when I began working for Madinah Wilson-Anton’s first state representative campaign. She had briefly lived in his district and he had expressed interest in her succeeding him, but she ended up moving back to her home district and challenging an incumbent. Still, despite his relatively good relationship with her opponent, he was always willing to sit down and help us out. We went to his house several times throughout the campaign, and when she won an upset victory he became a mentor not just to her, but to the new crop of progressive candidates who won in 2020 — all under the banner of the Working Families Party, which was now back in Delaware on the back of these wins.

Whether it was Madinah Wilson-Anton, Larry Lambert, Eric Morrison, or the several others elected that year and since, none of their work would be possible without the work that Rep. Kowalko did over his sixteen years in office. None of my work would have been possible without him, and I still sometimes feel that even with all of our new candidates, we have still not fully replaced him. But with a new cadre of progressives in place, he was finally able to retire in 2022.

His work never ended. Almost immediately after retiring, he helped co-found RISE Delaware, which would go on to play a crucial part in protecting Medicare benefits from tens of thousands of state retirees. While his own health began to decline over the coming years, he was still a reliable sounding board and source of wisdom for those of us trying to build on the left project he helped begin. 

The last time I saw him was in early September, when his wife Connie invited me over to pick up some old tabling materials that they weren’t using anymore. I wasn’t expecting to stay long, but Rep. Kowalko was there and full of energy. We discussed past projects he had worked on years ago, as well as what was to come—our plans for the 2026 elections and further building power in the future. He showed me some old newspaper clippings, some old awards, and then I left.

We were blessed to have had John Kowalko in Delaware for as long as we did, and we are blessed to still have his wife Connie and son John III, both equally talented organizers and advocates despite never serving in the legislature. However, it is undeniable that we lost something huge when he passed away. We will miss his presence and his influence, but we will do our best to honor him and carry on his work. Rest in peace and rest in power.