Joe Biden and Delaware's Business Democrats

The Indian River Bridge in Sussex County, Delaware.  Source: Wikipedia

           Delaware has been both a contrarian state and a bellwether. In the 1800s, it was a Federalist and Whig party stronghold while Jeffersonian Republicans and Jacksonian Democrats dominated the rest of the country. As the northeasternmost slave state, it had little appetite for secession, but enough Southern sympathy to be one of only three Union states to oppose Abraham Lincoln’s re-election in 1864. It remained predominantly Democratic in the decades after the Civil War, only going Republican for Ulysses Grant’s re-election in 1872, until William Jennings Bryan turned the Democrats’ focus to Western farmers, alienating a state increasingly focused on industrial Wilmington. Starting in 1896, Delaware began favoring the Republicans, culminating in its being one of only six states to vote to give Herbert Hoover a second term in 1932. After World War II, Delaware’s position between the Northeast and South and its blend of urban, suburban, and rural areas made it the quintessential swing state. After voting for Tom Dewey in 1948, it picked the winner in every Presidential election until it went for Al Gore in 2000, at the time the longest winning streak in the country.

Since then, Delaware- like its neighbors New Jersey and Maryland and most of New England- has been reliably Democratic. Democrats have held the governorship since 1993, both senate seats since 2001, both houses of the state legislature since 2009, and the state’s sole U.S. House seat since 2011. (From 1993-2011, the House seat was held by former Gov. Mike Castle, one of the most moderate Republicans in Congress, who infamously lost a primary for Joe Biden’s old Senate seat to Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell, who lost the general election to Sen. Chris Coons.) Delaware has voted well to the left of the national popular vote in every Presidential election since the 1990s, with George W. Bush’s 45.74%-53.34% loss to John Kerry in 2004 the closest any Republican has come this century.

This transformation has been led by New Castle County, the northernmost of the state’s three counties, which contains the city of Wilmington and roughly three-fifths of the state’s population. From 1936 to 1996, it voted for the winner in every Presidential election, usually by a margin close to the national popular vote (one notable exception was 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the county over Jimmy Carter by a single vote). Since then, like urban and inner suburban counties elsewhere in the Northeast (and, increasingly, in the rest of the country), New Castle County has become a Democratic stronghold. In every presidential election since 2004, the Democratic candidate carried it with at least sixty percent of the vote, and Donald Trump received less than a third of the New Castle County vote in 2016 even while he carried both of Delaware’s other counties.

With these trends, Delaware might be expected to be a fertile ground for left-wing politics. However, its politics have been marked by centrism, driven by the state’s large business community, and consensus, as might be expected in a small state (99 million Americans live in counties with a larger population than that of Delaware) where most high-level politicians know each other personally. Joe Biden’s Senate career began as a botched attempt at consensus among the state’s Republicans. In 1972, Sen. J. Caleb Boggs wanted to retire, but President Nixon and the state GOP feared a divisive primary between U.S. Rep. Pete du Pont (a future governor and presidential candidate) and Wilmington Mayor Harry Haskell. Boggs ran a reluctant and lackluster campaign, allowing Biden to pull the upset that November. Twenty years later, when the aforementioned Mike Castle was term-limited as governor, he arranged to seek the seat of Democrat Tom Carper, then the state’s lone U.S. Representative, who in turn ran for governor; despite being from different parties, both won their new offices handily.                                                                                                                

The biggest factor driving the relative centrism of Delaware Democrats is the state's business community. Thanks to a history of corporate-friendly laws and a favorable tax climate, Delaware has sixty percent of the Fortune 500 and almost ninety percent of the nation's initial public openings. Delaware has more LLCs than people. The state government gets more than one quarter of its revenue from corporate taxes, giving politicians of any stripe a strong incentive not to alienate the state's business community. This may reinforce the Democratic party's dominance at the state level, as Delaware has been immune from the recent trend of deep blue states electing Republican governors as a check on Democratic state legislatures (for example, the GOP has won five of the last seven elections for governor of Massachusetts and three of the last five for governor of Maryland). While every other Northeastern state (all six New England states, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland) has elected a Republican governor at least once since the turn of the millennium, Democrats have won the last seven elections for governor of Delaware, all but one with more than fifty-eight percent of the vote.

One episode in Joe Biden’s career that illustrates Delaware’s business community’s influence on its politics is his sponsorship of the 2005 bankruptcy bill. The bill, supported by the credit-card companies, generally tightened standards in filing for bankruptcy, particularly by limiting the amount of money filers could claim as a homestead exemption and prohibiting discharging most student loans in bankruptcy. This bill passed with mostly Republican support and was opposed by many more liberal Democrats (including Elizabeth Warren, then a professor at Harvard), and even President Clinton during the 1990s. More recently, centrist Democratic Sen. Tom Carper attracted a progressive primary challenger, Kerri Evelyn Harris, in 2018. Carper won by a two-to-one margin, but it was the closest primary he had in over forty years in office (as state treasurer, congressman, and governor before being elected to the Senate). In 2020, Sen. Chris Coons fared better, getting over seventy percent against Jessica Scarane, another progressive challenger, in the primary.

The most prominent Delaware Democrat is Joe Biden, the party’s nominee at a time of division between its centrist, pro-business wing and its leftist wing. If he loses, the left wing will likely take it as a sign centrist policies cannot win a national election; if he wins, he will have to find a way to bridge this division within his own party. The moderate Delaware Democratic tradition is taking center stage at a time when its principles are increasingly questioned within the party, and how Delaware’s most prominent politician handles this dispute will shape Democratic politics for years to come.