In February 2020, the Los Angeles Times published a piece profiling Wilmington in the context of Joe Biden’s presidential run. The article was framed around the conflict surrounding the “Delaware Way,” which it defines as a practice born out of the sense that Delaware is small enough to get all of the decision-makers together in a room to hash out agreements. It was a way of doing politics that Joe Biden himself helped build, but it was coming under scrutiny.
The article was a warning shot for two trends that would define the next four years of Delaware politics: an intense national focus and an intense political rebellion against the Delaware Way. Later in February, Joe Biden stormed from a distant fourth place in the Iowa Caucus to take the Democratic nomination. For the next four years, Delaware would become the veritable second capital of the United States. Then president-elect Biden celebrated his 2020 victory over Donald Trump on the Wilmington Riverfront, and the event was broadcast around the world. National media obsessed over his Rehoboth Beach trips, Hunter Biden’s various laptop hacks and gun crimes, and more recently Sarah McBride’s historic rise to become the first trans Congresswoman in history. Every major media organization was in Delaware the day after Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who paid a visit to the campaign headquarters that she would inherit in downtown Wilmington.
Political tumult spread deeper than just the occasional Joe Jam. As Biden’s consensus politics seemed victorious at the national level, it started to break down in his home state. In subsequent election cycles starting in 2020, the Senate Pro Tempore, the House Majority Whip, and finally the Speaker of the House went down in primary challenges from progressive Black women backed by the Working Families Party, as many of their colleagues were replaced in similar challenges or chose to simply retire.
This trend even spread to the statewide level, where Governor-Elect Matt Meyer stormed to a decisive victory over Lieutenant Gov. Bethany Hall-Long, who was backed by Gov. John Carney and nearly every other major elected official and establishment organization. Meyer then did the same in the general election against former state Rep. Mike Ramone, one of the foremost proponents of compromise and moderation in the Delaware GOP. Meyer’s victory was brought about by an electoral apparatus that adapted modern techniques used from other states, backed by a PAC fittingly titled “Citizens for a New Delaware Way.”
Now as we look ahead to 2025, the Joe Biden era is over, and the national spotlight seems to be moving on from its five-year love affair with Delaware. Joe Biden announced he was no longer running for re-election in July 2024, and though Kamala Harris’ campaign remained in Wilmington, her loss means that wide swaths of downtown real estate will clear out, along with the cable news vans and video trucks that have become a regular fixture of our small state.
Much has changed in Delaware politics since that fateful day in 2019 when Joe Biden decided to run for president. His victory was originally seen as a vindication of the Delaware Way of politics, but the political landscape today seems muddier than ever. So what happens next?
The Changing Delaware Way
One of the favorite conversation topics for Delaware politicos is what exactly the Delaware Way means. The traditional definition is the one that the Los Angeles Times used: getting all the decision-makers together and hashing things out in a civilized way. This is similar to the definition used by Stuart Comstock-Gay, president of the Delaware Community Foundation: “our practice of working together, even through our differences, to find common ground and get things done in this state of neighbors.”
However, many newer entrants into politics, myself included, have witnessed a less savory side of Delaware’s proud political tradition. Rather than a process of consensus-driven decision making, many see the Delaware Way as an insular form of politics. A politics that suppresses transparency and democracy, privileging well-connected incumbents and corporate elites while preventing reforms that could benefit the vast majority of Delawareans who are not included in the backroom dealmaking. When covering Delaware, reporter Ryan Grim derided it as the “synergy between the success of the state’s benevolent corporate monarchies . . . and the well-being of the state’s people.”
Both definitions touch on something true. Delaware generally has had a less open political conflict than other states and, as a result, we have been able to avoid some of the turmoil and deadlock seen at the national level. However, despite the nearly two million companies incorporated in our little onshore tax haven, we have let stark wealth inequality and structural violence go unaddressed. While politicians and corporate executives meet in the towers of downtown Wilmington, working-class and poor residents struggle with gun violence and rising rents just blocks away.
As a result, that old style of Delaware Way politics has been under attack for a while. In 2008, Jack Markell shocked the political world by defeating then-Lt. Governor John Carney to become the 73rd governor of Delaware. In 2016, primaries in the congressional, lieutenant governor, and Wilmington mayoral races became so crowded that the Democratic state party chair sent a letter asking many challengers to drop out.
Since 2019, the Working Families Party has become a major leader in the anti-establishment side of Delaware’s electoral politics, backing Marie Pinkney against Senate Pro Tempore David McBride, DeShanna Neal against House Majority Whip Larry Mitchell, and Kamela Smith against Speaker of the House Valerie Longhurst (Disclosure: I am the Political Director of the Delaware Working Families Party).
Despite all this change, the resulting political landscape cannot be described as a complete repudiation of the Delaware Way. The state senate completely changed leadership in 2020 after then-president pro tempore David McBride lost, but in 2024 the state house chose to simply allow everyone in existing leadership to take one step up, largely maintaining the status quo in the wake of Speaker Longhurst’s defeat. Meanwhile, Gov.-Elect Meyer was able to win a commanding victory by ignoring establishment endorsements, but he also raked in an incredible amount of money from corporations and wealthy donors, who have always had a seat at the table in the Delaware Way.
What can we make of these promising yet uneven changes to Delaware’s political landscape? I believe it starts by removing ourselves from a simple “establishment” vs “anti-establishment” binary way of thinking. We need to look at how people actually operate.
Which Delaware Way?
From my experience, I believe we can start to understand these contradictions by identifying three broad, and sometimes overlapping, coalitions that form Democratic politics, which I will call the Old Delaware Way, the Grassroots Left, and the New Delaware Way.
The Old Delaware Way contains what we would think of as the establishment, especially prior to 2016. That includes well-known figures like Gov. Carney and Sens. Tom Carper and Chris Coons, and of course President Joe Biden himself. But it also includes more local politicians like Pete Schwartzkopf and Valerie Longhurst, along with lots of older Democratic Party leadership.
The Old Delaware Way is more ideologically centrist and focused on working across the aisle while being incredibly hostile to primary challenges and combative political tactics. Instead, they believe in a more rigid hierarchy where people wait their turn and follow orders. They tend to perform best in traditionally blue-collar areas, rural areas, and downstate. Generally, this group has been more culturally aligned with organized labor, even though they are heavily tied with more corporate groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Association of Realtors.
The Grassroots Left is where I would position the politics of the Working Families Party, my own organization. This contains oppositional figures like state Rep. Madinah Wilson-Anton and Wilmington City Council member Shané Darby, but also people active in building coalitions like Sen. Marie Pinkney and Rep. Sophie Phillips.
The Grassroots Left is invested in policies that directly improves the material well-being of their base, such as raising the minimum wage and enacting rent stabilization, and is much more willing to use primaries and confrontational political tactics to win those things. They tend to perform best in younger and renter-heavy areas in cities and suburbs, along with areas that contain a lot of racial and class diversity. While generally friendly with organized labor once in office, the Grassroots Left relies much more on a variety of community groups for organizational support.
Last but not least is the New Delaware Way. If the Grassroots Left was one major beneficiary of the last 4-8 years, the New Delaware Way was an even larger one. This is a group that contains figures like Matt Meyer and Sarah McBride, as well as down ballot figures like state Sens. Bryan Townsend and Tizzy Lockman.
The New Delaware Way is much more supportive of transparency measures and social programs — like creating an Office of the Inspector General and enacting paid family and medical leave — than members of the Old Delaware Way. They are also more strictly partisan, not feeling the need to include Republicans in all decision-making. However, they tend to receive more support from affluent city and suburban voters, with a voter base that is much whiter than the Grassroots Left. They are much more open to primaries and willing to step out of line to support merit over seniority, but tend to retain much of the corporate and wealthy backing that the Grassroots Left spurns, buoyed by traditional liberal advocacy groups.
As I mentioned earlier, these are not mutually exclusive and exhaustive groups. Most of us have probably worked with and disagreed with people in each of these groups, and individual people have often shifted around in these groups. However, I think the distinctions are helpful in understanding the increasingly complex coalitions forming in Delaware’s governing majority.
For example, in the state senate in 2020, members of the New Delaware Way joined forces with the Grassroots Left to change leadership, resulting in the forceful advocacy of policies like paid family and medical leave and tenants’ right to representation. In 2024, the somewhat weaker New Delaware Way bloc instead formed a coalition with the Old Delaware Way to block attempts of the Grassroots Left to decide leadership. How that will affect policy remains to be seen.
The significant, but incomplete, change to Delaware politics that was defined by the rise of the New Delaware Way and Grassroots Left is important in understanding what opportunities and threats lie ahead. To be sure, Delaware has shifted to the “left,” but what that functionally means goes a lot deeper than one or two bills.
Beyond the Coalition Fights
One of the first signs that the old way of Delaware politics wasn’t sustainable came in 2008. In that year, the Chrysler-Newark Assembly Plant officially shut its doors, quickly followed by the General Motors Wilmington-Assembly Plant on Boxwood Road outside Newport. A few years later, the blue collar blow was met with a white collar one: MBNA was acquired by Bank of America, DuPont announced it was merging with Dow Chemical Company and relocating many local jobs, and AstraZeneca scaled down its workforce.
Almost spontaneously, each of those moves seemed to mark a major political shakeup: Markell won as the auto plants closed, and the 2016 primary came less than a year after DuPont made its announcement. Since then, Delaware’s politicians have been working to rebuild a new solid economic base, a process that has generally only gained headlines when it touches on other issues.
In 2017, Gov. Carney successfully privatized the state’s economic development office into the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, so discussions around new economic plans became proxy fights over done deals: Should we change the Coastal Zone Act to allow for more manufacturing? Should we give millions of dollars to Amazon to bring a warehouse to the old General Motors Plant? Should we allow state money to bail out and expand the Port of Wilmington?
In just the last two years, other structural issues have gained prominence. Fear of growing liabilities led the Carney Administration to try to switch Delaware retirees over to Medicare Advantage, a decision which led to massive public backlash and a complete repudiation by the legislature. However, when a Court of Chancery decision sharply limited the use of corporate “stockholder agreements,” the legislature quickly responded to corporate outrage at the decision by forcing through a controversial amendment to the corporate code, despite the potential effects on the pension funds of those very same retirees.
Closer to the ground, Delaware also faces rising housing and health care costs, debates over who will get the benefits of state spending, and the continued post-industrial plague of structural poverty that is most prominent in Wilmington, but seen up and down the state.
Over the next few years, Delaware’s economic projects will continue to complicate, its liabilities will continue to increase, and its corporate system will continue to come under scrutiny from transparency advocates on the left and corporate tycoons on the right. Meanwhile, our education system remains in desperate need of reform, structural poverty and violence continue to erode our communities, and a new, potentially authoritarian federal government threatens just about every potential advance we could make.
This is where Delaware’s rocky coalition politics will become crucial. This isn’t the 1980s anymore, or even the 2010s. The response of each faction will determine how these problems are addressed, and those solutions will in turn have effects on how each faction grows or adapts. While so many things are well beyond our control in the tiny state of Delaware, we will still see real material effects on how these national and global trends affect our local workers and communities.
Conclusion
The end of the Joe Biden era leaves Delaware a lot different than it was in 2020. We have an almost completely new set of political leaders who must navigate a complicated Democratic coalition to navigate a new set of problems. One thing is for certain: as Joe Biden leaves political office after fifty years, the old Delaware Way is leaving with him.
What happens next depends on a lot of things happening both below and above the surface. When the cameras aren’t watching, how will the new Democratic leadership deal with concerns of economic development and large-scale budgeting? Will they be able to expand our social safety net or address the costs of basic needs like housing and health care? How will different groups and communities be able to organize to ensure they receive their share of the power? How will the different factions use these changes to decide who leads?
All of this would be too much for one essay. However, as a representative of the Grassroots Left, I can put in my two cents. Over the next decade, we have the opportunity to build a state that shifts wealth and power downwards to everyday working people, a state that ensures that everyone is able to enjoy a decent standard of living. Any moves that are made against those goals will inevitably face backlash, and the Delaware Way, old and new, will continue to lose the power it has held for so long.