John Delaney

Delaney dropped out of the presidential race on January 31, 2020. He cited his failure to gain traction in polls and wanting to avoid pulling support from other moderate candidates as reasons behind the suspension of his campaign.

Delaney favors universal health coverage and has proposed a public plan that would cover all Americans under the age of 65 (while leaving Medicare for those over 65 untouched). He opposes Medicare-for-all, arguing that advocacy for the policy would help Trump get re-elected. During a June 2019 debate, Delaney claimed that hospitals will be shuttered under Medicare-for-all; Politifact, the Washington Post fact-checker, and Kaiser Health News all found this claim to be false and unsubstantiated.

However, statements made then since then suggest he has since embraced the moderate label. Appearing on PBS NewsHour on May 8, 2019, Delaney remarked, "I am probably the most moderate candidate" in the field of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.

On July 28, 2017, Delaney became the first Democrat to announce his run for president in 2020. Delaney did not run for re-election to Congress in 2018, choosing to focus on his presidential campaign. In November 2018, fellow Democrat David Trone was elected to succeed Delaney in Congress, and subsequently endorsed him for President in 2020. Delaney suspended his campaign on January 31, 2020.

Delaney introduced legislation to end partisan gerrymandering. The Open Our Democracy Act of 2017 would appoint independent redistricting commissions nationwide to end partisan gerrymandering, make Election Day a federal holiday, and create an open top-two primary system.

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

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

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.

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

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 the Montgomery County share of the district by almost 56,000 votes, accounting for almost all of the overall 58,900 margin of votes.

Delaney faced a closer-than-expected contest for reelection against Dan Bongino, the Republican candidate in 2012 for U.S. Senator from Maryland. He ultimately won by just over 2,200 votes, mainly due to carrying the Montgomery County portion of the district by over 20,500 votes.

After redistricting following the 2010 census, 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 into 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. The redrawn district, the state's second-largest, included nearly the entire western portion of the state, but the bulk of its vote came from the outer suburbs of Washington, D.C.

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 Montgomery County share of the district has three times as many people as the rest of the district combined.

Delaney co-founded two companies that were publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. He won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2004.

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, while Delaney was 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.

In 1993, Delaney co-founded Health Care Financial Partners (HCFP), to make loans available to smaller-sized health care service providers said to be ignored by larger banks. HCFP went public in 1996, and its stock began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 1998. Health Care Financial Partners was acquired by Heller Financial in 1999.

Delaney graduated from Bergen Catholic High School. Scholarships from his father's labor union (IBEW Local 164) as well as the American Legion, VFW, and the Lions Club helped Delaney attend college; he earned a B.A. degree from Columbia University in 1985, and a J.D. degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1988.

John Kevin Delaney (born April 16, 1963) is an American attorney, businessman, politician, and former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who was the United States Representative for Maryland's 6th congressional district from 2013 to 2019.