A Delaware to-do list
The trick is convincing the right people to do it.
If you’re looking for common-sense government reform at the state level, you could do far worse than the list I found from A Better Delaware. Here’s the thumbnail sketch of what they’re looking for:
On health policy: reforming the Health Commission, the Health Resources Board, and Certificate of Need reform.
On budget and tax policy: reduce the gross receipts tax, give back part of our state budgetary surplus by cutting individual income taxes, and reducing the transfer tax and corporate tax rate. Money should also go to the Rainy Day fund and reducing the public pension debt.
On government accountability: create an independent Inspector General’s office and update FOIA laws.
On energy policy: create an Energy Advisory Council to concoct a “realistic, science-based” energy plan to be approved by the General Assembly.
On education: create a method to track test scores from individual schools and methods to attract new teachers.
On workforce development: reform apprentice ratios and trim regulations that affect small business.
It’s a fairly ambitious list, but here’s the rub: at first glance, there’s probably 2/3 of the Delaware General Assembly you might guess is against many of these ideas. This is where readership can come in.
If you looked at a map of Delaware’s House districts you would see a clear demarcation. To its north the map would be almost exclusively Democrat blue, save for a pocket encompassing the area between Hockessin and Newark north of Delaware Route 2 where two House Republicans live. (No GOP Senator lives north of the line; in fact, for them it’s pretty much solid blue from Dover north.) South of the canal, aside from the Middletown area it’s pretty much the opposite: a sea of red with two blue islands. One island is the city of Dover and area surrounding Dover AFB, and the other is along the coast between Lewes and Dewey Beach. That latter area is slightly larger and cuts more toward Milton thanks to Democrat wins in Ernie Lopez’s erstwhile Senate District 6 and Steve Smyk’s former House District 20 that he vacated to unsuccessfully run for the Senate. Living in Sussex County, it’s that area which concerns me.
That portion of Sussex is an area where development has begat hundreds and hundreds of new houses over the last twenty years. The odds are pretty good that the average homeowner there is a retiree who sold his house in New Jersey, New York, or Pennsylvania for $700k and bought his brand new house with a batch of amenities for $350k, pocketing the rest. They left the blue state behind and moved to a Republican-leaning area of a state that used to be purple but has trended more blue as these people moved in, not figuring out that perhaps the reason they got such a deal in Delaware was that we did NOT fall in line with the regressive policies enacted by the jurisdictions they vacated.
Now I could say they’re messing the state up, but I’d be willing to bet those new residents wouldn’t object to most of the items on the ABD list. Yet the politicians they support will most likely and reflexively kill any bill that makes these reforms. So the task for the next two years is to put our legislative majority on the spot on those issues, as well as asking why our state is lagging behind the rest in a number of economic indicators, particularly job creation. Just ask them, in as public a manner as possible. Be the bird dog.
Too often in politics we only look at the next election cycle, but there is value in working for the long game. Obviously the conservatives in Delaware have a stronghold in most of Sussex County, although that’s being eroded a bit by those I described above moving into the Lewes/Rehoboth area. But there’s still plenty of opportunity there since one could describe it as a purple area - same goes for the part of suburban NCC I described above. Pick up a couple seats in that suburban area and regain the lost section of Sussex County next cycle and the minority is more workable, with additional potential in the NCC suburbs and perhaps the Dover area later on. While it seems to be a lost cause, there only needs to be six House seats and five Senate seats flipped for the GOP to have the majority. That’s a workable goal by 2030 (four election cycles away) when the next redistricting takes place - just pick up a seat or two at a time.
Notice that ABD doesn’t have any social issues on their agenda, and that’s part of what makes this a smart play. Unfortunately, nothing changes on that front until the GOP gets a viable majority (and perhaps a governor to back it.) For example, the Democrats did not enact the current legislation on abortion and gay “marriage” (pre-Obergefell decison) until they had established a majority in both houses, with help from a turncoat moderate Republican or two along the way. So the idea, since the old-line Democrat who was liberal with government spending but held the line on 2A and social issues has gone the way of the passenger pigeon, is to work the crowd and see who’s the least regressive by working these economic and good-government issues.
While this approach is good for the state, there’s no reason we shouldn’t question our federal leaders in the same way. Both our Congressional and Senate seat (the one held by Tom Carper) are up for grabs in 2024, and I suspect our current Congressman LBR is going to try and move up as Carper is aging quickly and may not run again. Some of the most radical folks on the other side already have their national playbook in place for the next two years and I’ll look at that in my next post.