The state of the Delaware 2024 race: U.S. House
Back in September, I said it was time for the players to emerge. Since then, a few have and my second in-depth look is at the U.S. House race.
I talked about the Senate races last week, so this week I turn things over to the race for Delaware’s lone House seat, which is an open seat for the first time since John Carney left (to become the current governor) in 2016. In this case, it’s another move since LBR is running for the Senate, as I noted.
Because it’s a rare open federal seat and LBR has basically broomed up all the opposition for the Senate seat, aspirants for federal office have flocked to the House position as perhaps a lower barrier to entry. No one has officially filed with the state Department of Elections for the position, but the FEC lists a total of six candidates who have filed their federal paperwork - five Democrats and one Republican.
Two of the Democrats, Curtis Aiken and Alexander Geise, are apparently “just in case” candidates - seeking the nomination in the hopes that the others have a mysterious plane crash or something. While I couldn’t find anything promising on Aiken, I did find Mr. Geise’s social media page, with the logo of a protest fist prominently displayed. So I’m not sure much more explanation is required.
The three Democrats who remain are, in alphabetical order, current State Treasurer Colleen Davis, who is running from cover as her term doesn’t expire until 2026, a State Senator who goes by the name Sarah McBride (with a birth name of Tim) with the same advantage, and Eugene Young, who currently runs the Delaware State Housing Authority.
Buoyed by a huge influx of money and support from LGBT+ organizations as a person trying to trailblaze as one of the first transgenders in Congress, McBride has vaulted into the financial lead with a massive $850,177 war chest based on nearly $1.3 million raised. McBride has outraised all opponents by a nearly 3:1 margin, and has over 4x the cash on hand as Young does. And while McBride bills himself as “the voice Delaware needs in Congress,” McBride only has about 1/4 of her individual contributions from the state of Delaware, although surely some of the nearly 1,300 donations bundled from ActBlue came from Delaware as well. Interestingly enough, all the Democrat candidates with FEC reports use ActBlue, which makes it a little more difficult to determine how much came from instate. (Maybe that’s intentional.)
But I’m going to start with Davis, who curiously has no true issue page but instead touts her fiscal abilities as Delaware’s state treasurer. This seems to be the extent of it:
Through her personal experience and her work as Delaware Treasurer since 2018, Colleen Davis has a deep understanding of what middle and working class families go through, and has fought to lower the cost of living in Delaware.
She has worked to expand everyone’s ability to save for retirement through the creation of the Delaware EARNS program, and has expanded access to savings accounts and banking across underprivileged and vulnerable communities through her work to grow ABLE accounts and on the Banking Desert Initiative.
As a former ambulance driver and physician assistant in neurosurgery and obstetrics, Colleen has cared for a child killed by a violent gunman, single parents without insurance and women in need of critical reproductive care. She knows that healthcare must be accessible and affordable for everyone, and that no one should take away a woman’s right to make her own medical decisions.
So she’s on the pro-abortion bandwagon despite the fact state law was changed to provide for it in 2017. Gotcha.
I’m going to paraphrase on McBride’s “priorities” to some extent because the headings are more like sentences, but in order they are health care, abortion, economy, unionization, criminal justice reform, climate change, and gun violence. Read through them and you’ll see that McBride would fit right in with the far-left “Squad.” And while it’s not hard to do with our state legislature that has Democrats voting in practical lockstep, McBride has yet to get a vote correct on the Delaware Accountability Project.
Similarly, Young takes a longer phrase to do what I’ll do as a paraphrase for his issue page. His top issues are housing (naturally), economic opportunity, healthcare, climate change, and Social Security/Medicare.
Given that Davis is less of a known quantity on the issues but has a fiscal track record, I would say she and Young are fighting for the more moderate Democrat vote, with McBride scooping up the extremists and the national LGBT+ cash. Young is sort of in the middle ground between the two politically, but Davis hails from Sussex County, where there’s still some portion of classic conservative Democrats. Thus, despite the obvious gender dysphoria, McBride has to be the prohibitive favorite to secure the Democrat nomination.
On the GOP side, Donyale Hall is a familiar name since she ran for LG in 2020. (Disclosure: I chipped in a few bucks to that campaign.) She also ran for Delaware State Senate in 2018 and Dover City Council last year, losing both times. Given her tremendous financial and voter registration disadvantages, the odds are against her in this race, too, but hope springs eternal. She’s even kept the same tagline, “So That All May Prosper.”
Obviously, Hall looks at things from a different perspective as an Air Force veteran. Her platform is a three-legged stool (again taking a little editorial license): fiscal responsibility, crime, and education.
The problem here is that we all know the federal government is wasteful, that crime is an issue, and the educational system is subpar. It’s interesting to me that two of these three issues were also part of her 2020 LG platform - she simply swapped in crime for economic advancement, for which she wrote then:
“So That All May Prosper” isn’t just a campaign slogan. It’s a commitment to providing our families quality jobs. As a small business owner, Donyale understands the key to economic growth is to roll back regulations that put unnecessary strain on entrepreneurs throughout the state.
To me, that would be more useful on a federal level than talking about crime, which is truly more of a local issue. Or perhaps she could expand her platform to six topics, which seems to be about the norm with other candidates.
Maybe the biggest problem here, though, is that the beating the GOP has taken statewide for decades has hollowed out the system such that they either get first-time candidates who don’t know the ropes or perennial candidates who seem to have no other purpose than to take one for the team. It’s too bad because the classic GOP message is really the one that’s more attuned to working families trying to get ahead on their own: keep more of what you have and get a fair shot at prosperity using your abilities. Unfortunately, the Republican Party leadership has gunked that message up to simply make themselves the party of big government that’s more efficient.
Yet the people seem to want bread and circuses; in return for that life of ease, they get a future dictated to them. That doesn’t play in this establishment.
Anyway, in the next installment sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll take a look at the governor’s race. It’s more of the same.