In November of 1992, Governor Mike Castle and Congressman Tom Carper switched jobs. Neither man said it out loud, but everyone knew. Almost immediately, the 1992 election — with Tom Carper moving from Congressman to Governor and Mike Castle moving the other way — became a foundational touchstone for the Delaware Way. Despite being from opposite parties, the two men had very similar politics and shared a substantial number of voters: Carper won with 65 percent and Castle with 58 percent, meaning a substantial portion of the electorate happily split their tickets to keep both politicians around.

For decades, “the swap” served as an example of how Delaware voters were all in on the political culture that people like Carper and Castle were building. The Delaware Way relied on a bipartisan consensus of pro-business economic development and relative social moderation. Delaware voters  — especially comfortable, white-collar professionals in the suburbs around Wilmington — seemed to be on board. With hindsight, we now know that this would not prove to be stable.

Since 1992, Delaware has become a firmly Democratic state, and our politics has become increasingly polarized over the decades. This may seem like a total break from the Delaware Way of the 1990s, but many of the hints of the state’s political future could be found in this era-defining election. To understand how we got from “the swap” to today, we must first understand how each party was changing.

The Pro-Choice Republican

For nearly the entirety of the twentieth century, the Delaware Republican Party was run by a specific type of person. Historically, Republicans had their roots in the northern part of Delaware as a pro-business, anti-slavery party. The party was largely uncompetitive after the Civil War, as the state typically preferred the overtly white supremacist Democratic Party. When they finally gained strength near the turn of the century, they split over a contested U.S. Senate election, but after 1906 the party was firmly in the hands of the du Pont family and their allies.

While the Republicans needed to have a presence in southern Delaware, and frequently won elections in Sussex County when they had the more conservative candidate, their power center was firmly in the boardrooms of the north. This influence peaked in the 1970s when Pierre S. du Pont IV (Pete du Pont), the grand nephew of his namesake that built DuPont into a global force, was elected governor. While he narrowly won Sussex County, his real base of power was in the northern suburbs of Wilmington: the “red crescent” that ran from Brandywine Hundred all the way down to Newark where most white collar workers and DuPont employees lived.

Mike Castle was a favorite son of the DuPont Republicans. His father was a patent attorney for the company, and Mike attended Tower Hill before leaving the state for school. When he returned to Wilmington, he practiced corporate law for a few years before being elected to the state legislature in 1966. Across his ten-year legislative career, he represented the wealthy white neighborhoods in and around Wilmington and established a strong reputation as a fiscally conservative, socially moderate Republican. While he was a firm supporter of the business community, he was not unwilling to raise taxes when necessary and was somewhat liberal on issues like abortion and race relations. This was not unusual for Republicans of his time — the one Republican governor he served under was Russ Peterson, the former DuPont executive who raised taxes on the rich and passed the Coastal Zone Act. 

After 1976, Castle retired from the legislature and was planning to retire from politics altogether until he received a call from Pete du Pont in 1980. The Republican governor had been elected with a Democratic lieutenant governor four years before, and he wanted a close ideological ally to run with him for re-election. Castle agreed, and the rest went smoothly. He was comfortably elected to the lieutenant governor seat, and when du Pont was term-limited in 1984, Castle moved to the governor’s seat without much competition. This was how things tended to work in the Delaware Republican Party.

However, things were changing beneath the surface even in the 1980s. While Delaware voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, it had not seen the same conservative social movements that helped sweep Reagan to power elsewhere. Social conservatives were still relatively split between the parties downstate and not very well organized. As a result, Democrats and Republicans alike tended to be relatively liberal on issues like guns and abortion. Castle himself was one of the most socially liberal Republican leaders in the country. This would become an issue for a certain number of Republican voters.

In 1989, the Delaware pro-life movement had its coming-out party. In the wake of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, which allowed for some restrictions on abortion, Frederica Republican Rep. G. Wallace Caulk introduced House Bill 75 which would require parental consent before minors received an abortion. While Delaware’s pro–life movement had existed for years, this was the first major issue they became organized around. Michael C. Jacobs, a retired Air Force officer who had recently moved from Vermont to Millsboro, helped organize a massive “family rally” in support of the legislation. While the legislation was never brought to the floor, it helped energize a new wave of conservative activism.

In 1990, Jacobs was elected chair of the Delaware Right to Life PAC (LIFE-PAC), which shifted its tactics away from simply donating to candidates who opposed abortion towards building a more sustainable conservative electoral force. Their first major test of strength would come in 1992 as Castle prepared to run for Congress. He would not face the same easy path to the Republican nomination that he had come to expect since running statewide in 1980. On one hand, he would face a challenge from Republican Treasurer Janet Rzewnicki. However, neither Castle nor Rzewnicki satisfied the conservative activists, especially in the pro-life community. Instead, they recruited Seaford newspaperman and anti-abortion activist Bryant Richardson. While Richardson had little political experience, he quickly made newspaper headlines when local TV stations refused to show his ads, which depicted aborted fetuses in an effort to highlight Castle’s pro-choice record.

Ultimately, the outgoing governor won the election for Delaware’s sole representative in Congress, but not by a convincing margin. He won only 55 percent of the vote, as Rzewnicki won 30 percent and Richardson 13 percent. His victory was made possible by landslide margins in the northern part of the state, including winning 75 percent of the vote in the white, wealthy House District 4. 

Downstate did not look so rosy. In some districts he won less than a third of the vote, bottoming out in rural House District 35, where he won just 26 percent of the vote and came in third. For the time being, these downstate Republicans did not have the numbers to throw Castle out, and he continued to the general election.

“I’m certain I’ll live through Carperism.”

If the Republican Party was at the beginning of an era of change, the Democratic Party was finally at the end of one. If the GOP had long been the party of the upstate business community, the Democrats were more divided. While they did well among downstate rural voters — the most conservative in the state — they also controlled the city of Wilmington and its blue-collar southern suburbs as Black voters and blue-collar workers joined the nationwide New Deal coalition.

In order to wrangle these unwieldy coalition members, the Democratic Party often fell victim to what its critics referred to as “bossism.” Most notorious were men like Leo Marshall, who served as Wilmington Democratic Party Chairman from 1965 until his death in 2000 and was notorious for building a city machine that was ruthless against party outsiders trying to gain power. However, the real breaking point came in 1968. Nationwide, the campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert F Kennedy inspired a new generation of liberal Democrats to get involved in politics. Locally, Democratic Gov. Charles Terry — a Kent County conservative — became a local villain for keeping the National Guard in Wilmington for eight months after the riots in the wake of the Martin Luther King assassination.

After Terry was defeated in the 1968 elections, Democratic reformers got to work. Groups like the Democratic Forum attracted young, idealistic liberals who flooded the Democratic Party and helped elect a new reform-minded party chair, Harry Topel, in 1970. It would take more to change the party, but these reformers saw election victories fairly quickly. In 1972, former Democratic Forum member Joe Biden won an upset victory to the U.S. Senate, and in 1974, a new slate of reform-minded “Watergate Babies” won election to the Delaware state House and Senate, including people like future Speaker of the House Orlando George.

In 1976, another young reformer would win a surprise victory for statewide office. Tom Carper was not originally from Delaware, but when he attended the University of Delaware for graduate school after leaving the Navy, he quickly made political connections. In 1974, he served as treasurer on the congressional campaigns of Jim Soles, another idealistic reform-minded politician and university professor who lost in a landslide to Pete du Pont. When Democrats did not easily find a candidate for State Treasurer in 1976, Carper threw his name into the ring and launched a vigorous campaign that vaulted him to one of the highest elected offices in Delaware.

For his first few years, Carper did little but his official job. As treasurer, he learned the ins and outs of the state finances, and collaboration with the du Pont administration gave him an appreciation for the same fiscal lessons that du Pont and Castle had been preaching for years. In 1982, Carper ran for Congress, beating a scandalized Republican incumbent. He would serve in that seat for the next decade as he built up a reputation that would eventually carry him to the governor’s seat.

By the 1980s, the young, idealistic reformers of the 1960s and 1970s had grown up. While they battled with the religious right on social issues and maintained a skepticism of machine politics, their economic beliefs were more nuanced. Many of these young liberals were categorized as “Atari Democrats” by the national press — high-tech, entrepreneurial, and supportive of free markets. In Delaware, many of these types of voters could be found in the state’s booming banking industry. In 1981, Gov. Pete du Pont had signed the Financial Center Development Act into law, which helped bring tens of thousands of new jobs into the state. Those new workers flooded into the suburbs around the city of Wilmington, and they would transform the state’s political coalitions.

The power of the new, young reformers would help bolster Carper’s political career. While the Congressman had kept a somewhat low profile in party politics throughout his career, this would change in the latter half of the 1980s. As Carper eyed the governor seat in 1992, he looked for an opportunity to flex his muscle within the Democratic Party and found a perfect opportunity in 1988. That year, New Castle County Democratic Chairman Eugene Reed Sr, a former union ironworker, interfered in a local campaign for county council between party favorite Susan Holmes and reformer Mike Purzycki. He printed a number of inflammatory and incorrect fliers that were distributed throughout the district — a commonly-used and effective tactic that won Holmes the election. However, Reed made a key mistake. The party forgot to add a “Paid for by” line, allowing Purzycki to report him to the Attorney General’s office.

As it would turn out, Reed had also been helping launder thousands of dollars to Holmes throughout the primary through straw donors, including one contribution given by a completely fictional person. While this was not a deadly serious crime, it was more than enough to cause an outcry among voters and politicians. Into the breach stormed Tom Carper, who would use the scandal to elevate his own candidate to chair the New Castle County Democratic Party. He recruited Joseph Reardon, a DuPont chemist living around the historically Republican Pike Creek who had been one of the original volunteers for Biden in his 1972 election. Together, Carper and Reardon built a coalition within the Democratic Party rooted in the white-collar suburbs in the “red crescent,” and handily defeated Reed in his re-election bid.

The former party establishment would not let Carper get away with this without fighting back. In 1990, Carper was primaried for the first time ever by Dan Rappa, a building contractor from Newport who was closely allied with Reed and other traditional, blue-collar Democratic figures. The election would not be particularly close. Rappa was not well-funded, and primary voters were now overwhelmingly the white-collar, professional workers who were perfectly happy with the job that Carper was doing. The incumbent congressman thumped Rappa by a 90-10 margin. After the election, a bitter Rappa addressed his supporters: “I’ve lived through Nazism, Stalinism, and I’m certain I’ll live through Carperism.” He would try to primary Carper again in 1992 as he ran for governor, but he lost by a similar margin. Carperism was coming no matter what the old party figures tried.

The Fall of the Carper-Castle Voter

Both Mike Castle and Tom Carper entered the 1992 general election having successfully navigated their changing party coalitions. They would both win the general election handily, and the results did show the power of a growing Delaware Way. Out of the 41 house districts in the state, Carper and Castle would both win in 34 of them. The only areas where Castle lost in the general election were the Democratic stronghold of Wilmington and a few areas of Kent County that historically had gone blue.

There were two types of districts that went most strongly for both Castle and Carper. One was the affluent “red crescent” suburbs described above. Both men had played their part in the passage and implementation of the FCDA that brought the banking industry to Delaware, and Carper had built up a moderate, pro-business record in Congress that assuaged any concerns that this historically Republican area had about voting for a Democrat. On the other side were the rural, southern districts which had given Castle so much trouble in the primary. By the 1990s, these areas — even when they were historically Democratic — were in the process of leaving the Democratic Party, and they begrudgingly supported Castle when the alternative was the Chinese Lieutenant Governor S.B. Woo. Just as in the upstate suburbs, southern rural voters had not found a reason to be offended by Tom Carper just yet, and they largely supported him over his poorly-funded Republican opponent.

Tom Carper and Mike Castle would continue to serve statewide for the next 18 years. Despite Castle’s closer-than-expected primary victory, both men had a sense of inevitability around them that largely scared away any serious, well-funded challengers in either the primary or general elections. However, the political winds did not stop blowing, especially on the Republican side.

While conservative activists had failed to score a victory against Castle in 1992, they continued to organize. By the end of the 1990s, LIFE-PAC was getting involved in a majority of Republican legislative primaries in favor of anti-abortion candidates. Conservative activists began to finally break through in 2000. With Carper term-limited for the governor’s seat, the Republicans would try to put their best foot forward, and the choice of the traditional business establishment was John Burris, the former House Majority Leader and president of the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce. Burris reluctantly decided to run, but he was joined in the race by an unexpected candidate. Bill Lee was not a political newcomer by any stretch of the imagination. As far back as the 1960s, he was active in the Republican Party, and had served as Sussex County Republican Chairman from 1973 to 1977. In that role he had been a strong booster of Ronald Reagan’s failed presidential challenge against Gerald Ford, but his political activism was stymied not long after when he was appointed to the judiciary by Pete du Pont.

Lee officially decided to leave the judiciary after achieving a good deal of fame presiding over the murder trial of Thomas Capano in 1998. While he was not initially as well-connected to the conservative movements of the southern part of the state, they latched onto him as an alternative to the firmly establishment Burris. Despite being outspent 5 to 1, Bill Lee came just 46 votes shy of defeating Burris, out of nearly 28,000 votes cast. Burris scraped through his strength in Kent County and some parts of New Castle County, but was completely swamped in Sussex County, where Lee won 55 percent of the vote. Burris would go on to be defeated in a landslide by Ruth Ann Minner in the general election.

After nearly breaking through in the election, downstate activists finally gained institutional power at the Republican Party convention in 2001. Since the 1970s, the state Republican Party chairman had typically been a close ally of the business elite, and a close personal friend of either Pete du Pont or Mike Castle. Since 1988, that chair had been Basil Battaglia, a Wilmington attorney and long-time ally of Castle. However, in the wake of Republican losses up and down the ballot in 2000, Battaglia faced a challenge at the following convention, most notably from Sussex County Republican Chairman J. Everett Moore Jr., an attorney from Georgetown. As with Lee, Moore was not a conservative activist, but his candidacy served as a vehicle for a frustrated grassroots in Sussex County. He trounced Battaglia at the convention, with 212 delegates to Battaglia’s 95. One of his main focuses would be expanding the map for Republicans, especially in his home county of Sussex.

Throughout the 2000s, the Republicans continued to build their base in Sussex County by electing conservative Republicans to replace retiring conservative Democrats, many of whom had served since the 1960s or 70s. In 1976, when du Pont won the governorship, the Democratic Party was evenly split geographically. In the state house, they had 16 seats above the canal and 10 seats below. At the same time, the Republicans were largely based in the north: 12 seats above and 3 seats below. By 2009, this had shifted drastically: Democrats had 19 above and 3 below, while the Republicans had 6 above and 13 below. As the Republicans became increasingly based in the southern part of the state, Mike Castle would be caught by surprise.

After Joe Biden was elected vice president in 2008, a special election was scheduled for 2010 to complete his term after Ted Kaufman was appointed for just two years. It seemed like a foregone conclusion that Mike Castle could easily slot into this seat as Republicans were expected to overperform. Unfortunately for him, Christine O’Donnell joined in the race as well. The conservative O’Donnell had been building a base among downstate conservative activists since moving to Delaware in 2003 to briefly work for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. She was recruited to run for senate in 2006 by anti-abortion activists, and after losing the primary that year she ran again in 2008, earning about 35 percent against Joe Biden. In 2010, she saw an opportunity against Mike Castle, who had earned a reputation as a moderate by voting for things like the cap-and-trade bill in Congress.

On September 14, O’Donnell won a massive upset against Mike Castle by a margin of 6.2 percent: just over 3,500 votes. The geographic distribution of that victory was especially damning. Mike Castle dominated in the historic red crescent; he won every single district bordering the northern arc of the state and several Wilmington and New Castle districts, even winning his home district north of Wilmington with over 80 percent of the vote. But he was unable to win a single district south of Newark. While O’Donnell did not dominate any one area as much as Castle dominated the red crescent, she put up victories of 50 percent and more in many of the districts of western Kent and Sussex counties, the hotbeds of conservative and evangelical activism in Delaware over the past several decades. Castle bitterly conceded the race, but never went on to endorse O’Donnell in the general. She did not win.

Tom Carper never faced a downfall in the manner that Castle did. In 2018, he faced the most competitive primary of his career when political newcomer Kerri Evelyn Harris was able to score 35 percent of the vote against the man who had won more elections than any politician in Delaware history by that point. Harris’s unexpectedly strong showing served as prelude to a change in the Democratic Party that has since gone on to define the last decade of Delaware politics: a progressive, multi-racial insurgency based in Wilmington and its southern suburbs that supplanted the previous party machinery that Carper defeated. Whether this movement could have eventually grown to replace Carper we will never know. The senator retired in 2024, closing out  nearly a half-century in public office.

The story of “the swap” in 1992 serves as an important reminder to those who analyze politics in Delaware. Even the things which are taken for granted in our political system are often obscuring the things that will lead to their own downfall. The only constant in elections and government is change, and that change will come for all of us eventually — we just need to know where to look.