# Michael Katz **Michael "Mike" Katz** is a Delaware physician and businessman who won the **2026 Republican nomination for U.S. Senate** on September 15, 2026, and will face incumbent Democrat [[Chris Coons]] in the November 3 general election. He is notable less for the race — Delaware's Senate seat is rated Solid D — than for the path that brought him to it: Katz has been the nominee or officeholder of **three different parties in under twenty years**. ## Career Katz is a pediatric critical care anesthesiologist, trained in pediatric anesthesia at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He also owns a commercial real estate company. ## Electoral history - **2008** — Elected to the Delaware State Senate from the 4th District **as a Democrat**; served until losing his re-election bid in 2012. - **2024** — Ran for U.S. Senate as the nominee of the **Independent Party of Delaware**. - **2026** — Won the **Republican** primary for U.S. Senate with roughly 77% of the vote, defeating John Shulli, a military veteran and part-time faculty instructor at the U.S. Army War College. The Associated Press called the race at 8:19 p.m. on September 15. ## 2026 campaign Katz was endorsed by the Delaware Republican Party. He campaigns on lowering the cost of living, changes to the health care system, and federal fiscal restraint. If elected he would be the first Republican to hold the seat since William Roth, who served from 1971 to 2001 — a 25-year gap. > [!warning] Unresolved > Katz's party-switching sequence is documented, but his stated *reasons* for each move are not established to two independent sources. Whether the 2024 Independent Party run and the 2026 Republican run reflect an ideological migration or ballot-access pragmatism is an open question this page does not answer. ## Why he is in this KB Katz is a clean illustration of **state-party bench depletion**. Delaware Republicans, having failed to elect a senator in a quarter century, nominated a man who sat in the state Senate as a Democrat and carried a third party's banner two years earlier. That is a party recruiting from outside itself — the structural condition, rather than any individual race, is the thing worth tracking. See [[DE-Sen-2026]] for the race file. ## See also [[DE-Sen-2026]] · [[Chris Coons]] ## Sources - [WHYY — Katz defeats Shulli in Delaware's Republican primary](https://whyy.org/articles/election-2026-delaware-primary-senate-republican-winner/) - [Ballotpedia — Michael Katz](https://ballotpedia.org/Michael_Katz) - [Wikipedia — Michael Katz (politician)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Katz_(politician))