Why should Delaware care?
As the 2026 campaign season launches, a newly revealed political contribution could bolster House Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown’s political power. It also cements the status of Phil Shawe within the Delaware political establishment — a position that comes in contrast to his outsider activism of the past.
Phil Shawe, the polarizing New York executive whose financial largesse helped propel Gov. Matt Meyer to victory in 2024, is now throwing his weight behind a new political action committee controlled by Delaware House Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown.
Amended campaign finance reports filed last month show that a political organization funded by Shawe is the sole contributor, so far, to Minor-Brown’s Back on Track PAC.
The contribution follows a decade of well-funded assaults on Delaware’s brand by Shawe through a campaign he launched immediately after the state’s Court of Chancery ordered a forced sale of his company, TransPerfect. In recent years, his activism has shifted from the courts to politics.
While the roughly $50,000 donation to Minor-Brown’s PAC is not an immense amount – even for little Delaware – it now signals a completion of Shawe’s transformation from a outside agitator to an individual with deep ties to Delaware political establishment.
Building a party war chest
For Minor-Brown, the contributions allow her to control a war chest for what could become a contentious legislative campaign season ahead of primary and general elections this fall.
Though she might not face a challenge to her own New Castle-area seat, Minor-Brown’s fortunes as House speaker could depend on the outcome of her legislative allies’ races – some of whom already face primary challengers. Following the November election, the new members of the Delaware House of Representatives will vote for their next speaker.
In an interview with Spotlight Delaware, Minor-Brown acknowledged that the Back on Track PAC is hers, saying she launched it to “support Democratic candidates up and down this state.” Her party, she said, needs another financial stream for the upcoming election.
Asked if she has established an alliance with Shawe, Minor-Brown pushed back against the characterization. She said she intends to raise money from other donors as well.
Minor-Brown also asserted that anyone donating to the PAC will be supporting the Democratic Party broadly, and not her individually.
“They’re supporting the mission of the party,” she said. “It doesn’t mean they’re supporting my mission solely, and it doesn’t mean that I’m for sale, or bought and sold.”
Nevertheless, news of the donation has sparked alarm with some progressive members of the legislature, particularly Rep. Sherae’a Moore (D-Middletown). Last year, Moore’s public sparring with Minor-Brown included her sending a cease-and-desist letter to House speaker. Moore also claimed then that she suffered from retaliation for not supporting a controversial bill to reform Delaware’s corporate law.
In an interview with Spotlight Delaware on Wednesday, Moore said she learned recently that Minor-Brown is actively searching for candidates to run against her in the primary election later this year.
And Moore suspects that the Back on Track PAC’s resources could be deployed against her.
“From what I’m being told, I’m her priority to get rid of,” Moore said.
Asked about the claim, Minor-Brown said she is too busy to focus on Moore, with policy challenges, such as addressing the high costs of energy and health care, taking up her time.
Still, the House speaker made it clear that bad blood remains between the two lawmakers.
“I don’t have time for childish nonsense,” she said.
To improve or malign the courts?
Beyond impacts on upcoming political campaigns, Shawe’s contributions to the Back on Track PAC suggest that he has solidified a bond with Delaware’s new political establishment.
It is a bond that first emerged in 2024 when his advocacy group spent more than $1 million in Delaware’s gubernatorial race — mostly on campaign ads to attack Meyer’s chief opponent in the primary election, then-Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long.
While the campaign spending was significant, Forbes reported last year that TransPerfect has nearly doubled its revenues since 2018 — growth that made Shawe a billionaire.
His new relationship in Delaware as financier of leading politicians contrasts sharply with political and legal activism from previous years when Shawe’s groups assailed Delaware institutions, particularly its courts, with the help of high-profile individuals like the Rev. Al Sharpton and celebrity attorney Alan Dershowitz.
The aggressive campaign began in 2015 after a Delaware judge ordered TransPerfect – a financially successful company Shawe co-founded with his then-fiancée Liz Elting – to be auctioned off. In the order, the judge said that infighting between the co-founders had caused “irreparable harm” to the company’s employees and clients, concluding that a forced sale was the only solution.
In response to the order, Shawe employed the high-profile New York public relations company, Tusk Strategies, to carry out what became a yearslong campaign against Delaware’s judiciary.
It began with well-organized and well-choreographed protests outside of Delaware courts. Then there were full-page attack ads published in the print editions of The News Journal. One in particular depicted a Delaware judge standing with four other white men in front of a row of largely empty wine bottles. A portion of a caption stated that Delaware was one of 18 states at the time that had never had an African-American person serve on its Supreme Court.
The activism continued even after Elting sold her half of TransPerfect to Shawe — a decision that averted the forced auction of the company.
During the Iowa caucuses that preceded the 2020 presidential election, Shawe’s mother launched a $500,000 ad campaign in that Midwestern state, claiming that then-candidate Joe Biden supported a Delaware judicial system that “cuts out thousands of people who end up hurt by the court’s decisions.”
In more recent years, Shawe’s advocacy groups — whose names include Citizens for a Pro-Business Delaware, Citizens for Judicial Fairness, and Citizens for a New Delaware Way — have periodically paid a mobile billboard truck company to circle downtown Wilmington with signs criticizing a lack of diversity among judges on the state’s courts.
To Delaware’s political establishment of past years, the aggressive activism was broadly seen as spiteful – or even bad faith. In 2019, Delaware’s Legislative Black Caucus characterized it as “external distractions from outside groups.”
That same year, the president of the Delaware State Bar Association claimed that Shawe’s advocacy was not meant to improve the judiciary, but to malign it.
But now, following the million-dollar spend in support of Meyer, as well as the recent contributions to Minor-Brown’s PAC, Shawe has gained a foothold among Delaware’s leadership. And his team seems to recognize it.
New focus on legislature
Chris Coffey, an executive at Tusk Strategies who has served as Shawe’s spokesman for several years, said their policy goals in Delaware are “judicial transparency and good government reforms.”
“We look forward to working with members of the state legislature to build a more equitable and transparent justice system for both individual Delawareans and companies domiciled there,” he said.
Because Delaware is the legal home to more than 2 million companies, its laws set the corporate governance rules for many of the biggest companies in the world.
Coffey’s statement comes about six months after Shawe’s advocacy group, Citizens for Judicial Fairness, published a press release celebrating a new Delaware court policy that changed how judges are assigned to cases involving businesses litigating in the state.
Rather than a single judge presiding over potentially multiple cases involving the same company, the new policy made that selection random – a process known as “wheel spin.”
It was a policy change for which Shawe had advocated over several years. The old policy was also one that Elon Musk, the widely influential Tesla CEO, had criticized to his many followers.
Within a press release celebrating the new court rule was a quote from Minor-Brown, which stated in part that “fairness and justice are the guiding principles of our judicial system, but we can’t fully uphold them by standing still.”
The appearance of the quote became the first public indication that some type of collaboration existed between Minor-Brown and Shawe’s advocacy team.
Four months earlier, Shawe’s team first announced that he would contribute financially to Delaware’s 2026 legislative races, in a press release published thought the group, Citizens for a New Delaware Way. In the statement, the group revealed he would spend at least $200,000 during the campaign.
“Following our successful effort in the 2024 governor’s race, we’ve long said that we’d turn our attention to the state legislature – especially the speaker and her allies,” Coffey later told Spotlight Delaware.