The attorney general may be the office on Delaware’s ballot whose decisions reach furthest into an ordinary week. Every criminal prosecution in Delaware runs through this office — Delaware has no elected county prosecutors — so whoever holds it sets the policy for what gets charged, what gets pleaded and what goes to trial. The office’s lawyers also represent state agencies in court, sue on the state’s behalf, protect consumers from fraud, advise police departments, and carry a top voice in Dover on bills about crime and the courts. The office is elected statewide to a four-year term. Exactly two names are printed on the ballot for it.
The incumbent is Kathy Jennings of Wilmington, Delaware’s 46th attorney general, who is asking voters for a third term. She began her career in the Delaware Department of Justice, where she spent more than twenty years as a prosecutor and rose to chief deputy attorney general, the department’s second-in-command, helping to create its Consumer Fraud Division along the way. She tried the case of serial killer Steven Brian Pennell, in which DNA evidence was admitted in a Delaware courtroom for the first time. She later spent time in private practice, returned to the department as state prosecutor under Attorney General Beau Biden, and served a year as New Castle County’s chief administrative officer — its second-in-command, managing a budget of roughly $300 million — before resigning in early 2018 to run for this office. She won it that November and won re-election in 2022. On September 15 she won the Democratic primary with 71 percent of the vote, ahead of Dwayne Bensing, the Delaware ACLU’s legal director, and Patty Rickman.
Her record in office centers on the two fronts her campaign talks about most. On crime, she points to a decline in gun violence during her tenure, measured by shootings and people shot, and credits her office’s large-scale gang indictments tied to Wilmington shootings and her advocacy of gun-safety laws, including the permit-to-purchase program. On the civil side, her office has joined some 60 multistate lawsuits challenging Trump administration policies or threatened changes, and her campaign says the work preserved hundreds of millions in federal funding for Delaware. On primary night, she told supporters, “I feel tonight like we’ve really seen the voice of the people speak out loud and clear.”
If re-elected, Jennings says a third term would focus on combating violent crime, improving the hiring and retention of prosecutors, and a “total revamp” of Delaware’s open-records law. She would also seek a statewide rule for more uniform, timely public disclosure of police body-camera footage after shootings and other serious uses of force.
The challenger is David C. “Dave” Graham of Kent County, a native Delawarean who is not an attorney — the Delaware Constitution does not require the attorney general to be one. Graham served in the U.S. Army and the Delaware National Guard, spent roughly 25 years as a certified public accountant, worked as a business manager at Nanticoke Homes, and has been a public tax enforcement official with the Delaware Department of Finance since 2003. He earned a commercial driver’s license at 67 and now works as a commercial truck driver. His route to this ballot was unlike his opponent’s: no Republican filed by the July deadline, so Graham sought his party’s nomination afterward; the Republican Party placed him on the November ballot in August, and he never competed in a primary. He has run for statewide office before — as a write-in candidate for governor in 2012, as the Independent Party’s candidate for this office in 2014, when he drew about 2 percent, and for the Republican nomination for governor in 2020.
Graham says his main reason for running is to make sure the Attorney General’s Office does not hinder the corruption investigations of Delaware’s new Inspector General — an independent, nonpartisan office created in 2025 — involving either party. “We need to start cleaning up the corruption in the state of Delaware,” he says, “and that starts with having me elected attorney general.” He would take a tougher approach to plea deals involving gun charges, improve pay for deputy attorneys general, and bring a “business mind” to running the department: “I have the business experience and understand control and command of an organization.” He criticizes Jennings’ lawsuits against the Trump administration’s agenda — he calls them motivated by “Trump derangement syndrome” — and says those fights belong to Delaware’s representatives in Congress. He also points to the last attorney general election, in which the Republican nominee lost by about 24,000 votes, a margin he calls “extremely close.”
One more name is registered with the Department of Elections as a write-in candidate for this office: Phil Dyer Jr. His name won’t appear on the ballot, but votes written in for him will be counted.
Voting in this race is already underway. Early voting opened Thursday, October 22 and runs through Sunday, November 1 at any early voting site in your county — for Kent County readers, the closest sites are Dover’s Elks Lodge on South Saulsbury Road and Wyoming United Methodist Church, with more in Frederica and Harrington. Sites are open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on October 22 through 24 and again on October 26 and 27, closed on Sunday, October 25, and open 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. from October 28 through November 1. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, with polls open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. at your assigned polling place. Your sample ballot and polling place are at the state’s voter portal, ivote.de.gov.
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