The smell of desperation?

As an "independent" voter, I'm suddenly getting a lot of attention from Delaware Democrats.

I know it’s still early in the Substack game and I don’t have tons of subscribers (yet) but I can pretty much guess that my subscription base doesn’t include anyone from the Delaware Democrat Party. Otherwise they would stop the fool’s errand of sending me full-color mailers touting the “bipartisanship” of someone who’s voted with Joe Biden 100% of the time. (On second thought, bring it on and waste your PAC-financed bankroll.)

Two more of those beauties arrived Monday, just to tell me that LBR* was “rated as one of the most bipartisan members of Congress.” (Again, she voted with Joe Biden 100% of the time. She was a less reliable vote for the previous president, although for half the time she was in the Congressional majority.)

This is interesting to me since we are basically rerunning the 2020 Congressional election for Delaware’s at-large seat except for two factors: horrible inflation that affects the pocketbooks of thousands of working First Staters and no mail-in voting. Over the past three cycles, LBR has managed a 14.5 point victory over the GOP’s Hans Riegle, whose claim to political fame was being the mayor of Wyoming, a 29-point thrashing of perennial candidate R. Scott Walker in 2018 (the prodigious user of plywood and paint and desecrator of trees is once again back in Delaware and running for Congress as a write-in after losing in South Carolina two years ago), and a 17-point win over almost-as-perennial candidate Lee Murphy in 2020, who was the lone GOP candidate to make the Congressional ballot in 2022. (There was another gentleman who had an FEC account and website, but nothing else.)

It’s worth noting that Murphy won the machine balloting in 2020, but lost mail-in voting by a wide margin. Guess what? A state court struck down mail-in voting this time, so she won’t have that advantage. And when you combine that with the poor economy and lack of consumer confidence, it may be why LBR has suddenly popped up on commercials on my local news and sent me so many mailings, as I am up to four now.

The political reality in Delaware, however, has been that the Democrats pretty much need only to turn out their 4x4 voters to win. (4x4 meaning they vote in all partisan elections, whether primary or general.) It’s a shame that just the Democrats in New Castle County are enough to win statewide elections, but 234,544 votes is usually sufficient. It would take a Herculean turnout from the other voters combined with depressed turnout from Democrats to have a shot, but if any year had the election to do that, this might just be the one.

But that electoral fact and a shallow bench are the reasons why the Republicans are running two first-time statewide candidates for the other three offices on the ballot, which is led by 2020 gubernatorial candidate Julianne Murray running for Attorney General. Then again, everyone who runs had to run for a first time somewhere and they’re usually the most passionate, hard-working candidates. Something I’ve noticed about Delaware politics is that Republicans go out and meet people while Democrats collect endorsements from the special interest groups in their pocket and (sometimes) dark money from various PACs and assume they can buy themselves another term. It would be nice to shock the world this time around, no? How about a different Delaware way?

In something that’s somewhat related and interesting, I found out that Delaware voters have the 7th-highest amount of “power” in electing a Senator and 8th most power overall nationwide, according to this WalletHub study. What they really don’t consider, though, is that the average Delaware voter is dead last in “power” for electing a Congressman because we are the largest single-representative state. (And the Democrats are in no hurry to change that by expanding Congress because a fair “compact and contiguous” split of the state would likely result in a GOP Congressman from Delaware, something we’ve not had in a dozen years.) Nor do I think WalletHub considered the number of legislators we have, just 62 for a state that’s about a million in population - then again, Maryland has 188 and they have seven times the number of people. (And its General Assembly is larger than my native Ohio’s as they have 132 legislators for nearly 12 million folks.) I think New Hampshire leads in that regard as they have over 400 legislators.

Anyway, since our state began yesterday with early (and often) voting this year - look for those free bus trips around Wilmington - I’m just going to tell you I’m going pretty much straight Republican on my ballot as my “endorsements.” There may be one Libertarian who gets my vote in a local race, but I haven’t decided on it yet. My wife may have to early vote because of her schedule that Tuesday, but I plan on waiting until Election Day like I always do.

Let’s pray for a clean election and new, honest leaders who understand that the job of government is simply to protect our inalienable and God-given rights.

*I got tired of typing out “Lisa Blunt Rochester” early on. So it’s LBR here.