Earlier this month, a storm of political change swept across America to return Republican Donald Trump to the White House. But governing institutions in the First State appear unshaken – at first glance.
Democrats, as before, will occupy the state’s congressional office, both Senate seats, its governorship, and both legislative houses. Yet some who participate in Delaware politics see change afoot on another front, a drift from what civic-minded residents have long called “The Delaware Way.”
To many, it means a spirit of compromise and bipartisanship, a sense that the state is small enough that powerbrokers of all stripes can gather in the same room to sort through differences and decide policy for Delawareans’ shared benefit.
John Marinucci, an advisory board member of the center-right nonprofit A Better Delaware who served as executive director of the Delaware School Boards Association until last year, regrets Delaware’s gradual shift away from this idea.
“Once you start identifying the common ground between the two sides, you find that there’s a lot more in common than there is opposing, and you’re able to solve a lot of problems,” he said. “The Delaware Way has always been to sit down over a cup of coffee and talk things through, person to person, and let go of the egos, so to speak.”
Did The Delaware Way fade due to a loss of civility?
But, he said, “an erosion over time” has transpired owing to a de-emphasis on civility in governance, something he attributed to both major parties.
“It seems nowadays that if you’re opposed to each other, you have to hate each other, and that’s not the way the Delaware Way used to be.”
The old paradigm displeases some political stalwarts but typifies most recent top-tier Delaware politicians. Its exemplars include relatively business-minded Democrats like retiring U.S. Senator Tom Carper and (in an earlier form) retiring President Joe Biden, Carper’s erstwhile colleague. Republicans like Senator Bill Roth, a pragmatic conservative, and former congressman and governor Mike Castle, a centrist, fit neatly into its mold.
Still, the memory of those Republicans gets fainter by the year. Carper unseated Roth 24 years ago, and Roth died less than three years later. In 2010, eccentric rightist Christine O’Donnell beat Castle in a Senate primary, leaving their party with no chance against liberal Democrat Chris Coons, who remains in office.
Free-market champion and chemical company executive Pete du Pont, who served as governor until the mid-1980s, is an even more distant recollection. The GOP has not held a statewide office since the tenures of Auditor Tom Wagner and Treasurer Ken Simpler concluded almost six years ago.
And as Republicans get scarcer, Democrats hew more strictly to a progressive party line. Over the last four years, three state House and Senate leaders lost in primaries to candidates supported by the far-left Working Families Party. State Senator Sarah McBride (D-Wilmington) has already become a leftist hero nationwide more than a month before she’ll take office in Congress, becoming its first transgendered member.
GOP marginalization impacts future of The Delaware Way
What will become of the Delaware Way as Republicans find themselves marginalized, and if the only currently competitive party inches farther to the left?
“The level of confrontation [now] bears no resemblance to what the Delaware Way was supposed to be,” John R. Toedtman, executive director of the pro-free-market Caesar Rodney Institute, told Delaware LIVE. “The confrontation basically manifests when you have single-party control of the government.”
A New York native who moved to Delaware a decade ago, Toedtman said the hyper-partisanship of which he spoke was also apparent in Republican dominance of local politics in the Empire State’s Nassau County in the 1980s and 90s.
“There was corruption all over the place,” he lamented. “You had deputy assistant sheriffs making $125,000 a year 40 years ago. Whether it’s Republican or Democrat — and now we’re talking 32 or 33 straight years — they’re not held to accountability; they get away with it.”
Problems Toedtman said arise from this situation in the First State include complacency among civil servants who fail to answer open-records requests efficiently or, sometimes, at all. He also cited one-party rule as worsening the failure of the state to improve K-12 education, for which Delaware ranks 45th among states according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. This is despite Delaware spending more per pupil than most states.
He found it particularly galling that Senate Democrats blocked legislation to address the fact that 17 Delaware schools scored under 10 percent proficiency in either English or mathematics. He ascribed that unwillingness to move the measure to a lack of bipartisan coalescence.
“That’s a commonsense problem; everybody is shocked by it,” he said. “And yet, the other side won’t do anything about it.”
A go-along-get-along approach, of course, can’t please everyone. And some figures on both the left and right think the Delaware Way has caused politicians to be agreeable and effective, sometimes insular and unresponsive.
Multiple definitions for The Delaware Way
Cassandra Marshall, the Wilmington Democratic Party chair, said she views the Delaware Way’s definition as twofold, depending on who is discussing it. On one hand, the term can mean working together thoughtfully. That can make many participants happy while leaving others disappointed that their concerns go unaddressed.
On the other, the approach can connote a “very familiar, insiderish way” of determining who gets patronage positions in government and who acquires power.
“In a lot of ways, it describes sort of a cliquishness where we sort of know you, we know where you went to school, we know who your parents are, we have a strong sense of you as a part of a circle of Delawareans,” she said. “So your name, your issue, the things that you’re interested [in] might get dealt with at the top of a list because it just feels as though you are part of this clique that gets some priority for getting things done.”
But in either sense of the phrase, she said, the Delaware Way still applies even if the political scene “changes players.” Her colleague Jane Hovington, who chairs the Democratic Party in largely Republican Sussex County, generally agreed regarding her locale. She said, however, that newcomers often bring a contrasting perspective.
“In Sussex County, there are politics, but they’re neighbors first,” she said. “And in some instances, elections are based on who your neighbor is as opposed to what party you are. But we’ve had a lot of people who have moved here from other states who are not privy to the Delaware Way. And so they look at politics as ‘Democrats are Democrats and Republicans are Republicans, and the two should not meet,’ and it’s a big divide for lack of a better word.”
She said some resistance to compromise comes from the rancorous presidential election that recently concluded, as well as the GOP’s impending dominance of all three branches of the federal government. But ultimately, she predicts the Delaware Way will persist.
“Our legislators work together, and the animosity is not there as it is nationally,” she said.
Chris Kenny, founder of A Better Delaware’s and this site’s owner and chief executive officer, expressed ambivalence about the Delaware Way.
“The so-called ‘Delaware Way’ is a double-edged sword,” Kenny said. “Idealistically, it represents a collaborative, civil, and moderate approach to governance. On the other hand, it is a euphemism for a closed and opaque political system that protects incumbent politicians, special interests, and antiquated and failed ideas at the expense of progress for regular people.”
He suggested the Delaware Way is worth preserving only in a less elitist, more inclusive form than it has often taken.
“We should continue to strive for collaboration, civility, and moderation, but get away from the good ol’ boys network and make room for new and competing ideas, and new voices more representative of and responsive to the voters.”
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