About Travis

I was born in Hagerstown, Maryland, and grew up on a farmhouse porch just over the line in Welsh Run, Pennsylvania. I'm the middle of three boys in a working-class family. My parents met in the Navy. My dad spent twenty years as a correctional officer at the Hagerstown prison, and my mom was a freight dispatcher.

At seven I got a piano for Christmas and found out I could play by ear.

When I was eight, a bad case of mono led to lesions on my brain. During a biopsy at the University of Maryland, I had a stroke. I spent weeks in a coma and woke up unable to speak, then spent months relearning to walk and talk. It took about three years to get my speech back, but I didn't quit. A nurse who cared for me in that hospital is the reason I became a nurse. I wanted to pay it forward.

I came out when I was thirteen. I paid for it. I was kicked out of more than one school, and opportunities were taken from me. I kept going anyway. As a teenager I bused tables at a crab house in Halfway, Maryland, to help my mom with the bills. I learned early that an institution can decide you're inconvenient, and that you can outlast it.

Massage therapy was my first career out of high school, meant to pay for medical school, until the Great Recession took that work away. So I became a nurse. I worked my way up the ladder the long way: floor nursing first, then step-down, then critical care. At Meritus Medical Center in Hagerstown, a patient's family nominated me for the DAISY Award for extraordinary nurses, and I won.

I spent years as a travel ICU nurse, four years in all. My first year was in ICUs at several hospitals in Las Vegas. Then I spent three years in the ICU at David Grant Medical Center on Travis Air Force Base in California, a Department of Defense hospital. I cared for service members and their families, people who had put themselves on the line for this country. Serving them was an honor. In 2019 the base commander awarded me a commander's coin for reporting a mistake I had made, even though speaking up put me at risk. Owning my errors is how I was trained to keep patients safe, and it's the same accountability I'll demand in the Senate, starting with my own.

After that, a travel assignment brought me to Delaware, as a recovery-room (PACU) nurse at Beebe Hospital. I'd loved Delaware since childhood vacations, and I made my home here. When the pandemic hit, I kept my Delaware home and spent about eight months in the COVID unit at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, New Jersey. Nurses held up phones so families could say goodbye to patients they weren't allowed to visit.

COVID broke something in me, and I left the bedside. Leaving felt like failing. It wasn't. Good nurses around me left too, because the system asked more than people can give.

At the bedside, I watched people skip medications, put off a diagnosis, and go into debt over one ER visit. That's a big part of why I'm running.

This wasn't my first time rebuilding. The recession took my first career, and the pandemic nearly ended my second. So I went back to massage therapy here in Rehoboth, and that's my work now. I know you can build again.

I live near Rehoboth Beach, where I put myself back together. I sing baritone with CAMP Rehoboth Chorus, and I still play piano. I've volunteered with local nonprofits and helped organize a rally in Rehoboth Beach for International Women's Day, and I kept showing up.

This campaign started in a room where I wasn't allowed to ask a question. Senator Chris Coons was speaking. I wanted to ask him about the Iran war and the billions in military aid to Israel he voted for in 2024, and about the money his campaign has raised from AIPAC's PAC and its donors, and from defense-contractor PACs. I was told I couldn't. The message was that we have to be nice to those in power.

I don't believe that. Standing up to people in power, politely and without fear, is the whole point of a democracy. If a constituent can't ask a senator a hard question, somebody needs to ask it from the ballot. So I decided to challenge him myself.

Getting your name printed on the ballot for U.S. Senate here costs a $10,000 filing fee. For someone living paycheck to paycheck, that's out of reach. I didn't think anyone should have to pay it for the right to run.

So I filed as a declared write-in. The Delaware Department of Elections lists me as a Qualified write-in candidate for U.S. Senator, which means your write-in vote for me is counted and reported. Since then I've written more than a hundred daily letters to Delaware.

This campaign is people-funded. I don't take Super PAC money. I've also made a pledge: I won't take a dime from AI or tech companies or their executives. When I vote on how to regulate AI, I won't owe them anything.

On November 3, find the U.S. Senate race on your ballot and write TRAVIS JACK STEVENS on the write-in line. If your ballot has an oval or box next to the write-in line, fill that in too.

I'd be honored to have your vote.