Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware has been controlled by Democrats at all levels of state government for more than a decade now, and Republicans have framed the November’s election as a chance to ensure they do not win a supermajority in the General Assembly. In recent weeks, however, discord within the party has made the party’s electoral prospects and future direction more cloudy.
For a Delaware Republican Party that has long struggled to win statewide office, the lead up to this year’s November election has been far from smooth sailing.
From infighting over a candidate’s misgendering of U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride to primary election losers subsequently launching write-in campaigns, the events of this fall have likely made Republicans’ uphill challenge of winning federal races next month even tougher.
Beyond the immediate electoral implications, fractures with the Delaware GOP have only raised more questions about the party’s identity — with leaders appearing divided over whether to lean into a more moderate- or MAGA-focused agenda to gain traction in the state.
“Leadership in the Delaware GOP needs to reflect hard on what happened, and this coming year, we need to reboot what is the Delaware GOP, what it stands for,” said John Shulli, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate who lost his primary and is now running as a write-in.
For some Delaware Republicans, questions about strategy first emerged when only one of the two party-endorsed candidates won their primary, suggesting a disconnect between the state party leaders and voters.
Those tensions then played out publicly when U.S. House candidate Joe Arminio was kicked out of a September forum for repeatedly misgendering incumbent U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride.
The incident generated opposing responses from Dr. Mike Katz, the Republican Senate primary winner, who called on Arminio to drop out of the race for “disrespectful” behavior, and the state Republican Party, which wrote on Facebook that forcing Arminio to leave the event was a violation of his First Amendment rights to free speech.
It also prompted two losing primary candidates to throw in their names as write-ins for the general election and a flurry of local political influencers questioning the party’s identity.
In sum, the incident and its lasting fallout represents the most tangible example of the Delaware GOP’s fractured strategy that seems unlikely to resolve before the upcoming general election.
Some experts said the tension between different factions of the Delaware GOP is particularly pronounced this election cycle, though a similar friction is taking place in many places between the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and more moderate Democrats.
“We often see this happening at times where the party is at a point of transition, where they’re trying to figure out what the future looks like,” said David Miller, a political science professor at American University.
Delaware Republican Party Chair Gene Truono did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s multiple requests for comment in time for publication.
Forum fallout
Reactions to the September candidate forum clarified tensions brewing in the Delaware Republican Party since before the primary election.
When Arminio was forced to leave the stage for repeatedly referring to Rep. McBride – the first transgender woman elected to Congress – as a “gentleman,” Katz criticized his counterpart’s behavior as inappropriate and advised the forum’s organizers to remove him. Later that same evening, Katz posted on Facebook calling on Arminio to withdraw from the race.
Katz’s statement opened the floodgates of Facebook commenters questioning his party allegiance. His background as a former Democratic state senator and independent candidate for U.S. Senate had been a point of contention among some Republicans when the state GOP endorsed him last spring.
However, in the lead up to the September primary, party leaders and Katz himself described his ability to appeal to Democrats and independent voters as a strength in his candidacy.
Katz’s response to the forum, however, led to his more conservative primary opponent, Shulli, who garnered just 23% of the primary vote, to file as a write-in candidate for the general election.
Shulli said he made that decision because Katz’s behavior “showed everyone he is a Democrat,” and the “Benedict Arnold of the Republican Party.”
Earl Cooper, who the state GOP endorsed at its spring convention for the U.S. House of Representatives but finished a distant third in the primary, also decided to throw in his name as a write-in candidate, but for the opposite reason as Shulli.
Cooper, who is also a former Democrat and has been vocal about his opposition to transgender girls’ participation in girls’ sports, said in an interview with Spotlight Delaware he did not find Arminio’s debate behavior “professional,” so he felt obliged to reenter the race against Arminio.
Adding to the slew of varied reactions, the state GOP posted on Facebook calling Arminio’s removal from the forum a First Amendment violation.
“Candidates should be able to speak, voters should be able to hear them, and no forum should substitute enforced language for open political argument,” the party wrote on Sept. 22.
Some Republican voters have framed the forum as a representation of candidates’ views on transgender issues, and thus as a litmus test for their conservative bonafides.
However, Matt Dickinson, a political science professor at Middlebury College, said he interprets the split as less about gender politics and more about a defense of free speech that has long been a priority for the Republican Party.
Some party leaders, too, said they viewed Katz’s reaction to the situation not as an indication that he supports transgender people, but rather that he would have handled the forum differently than Arminio did.
Katz told Spotlight Delaware the issue was about “decorum,” rather than him taking a position on free speech or gender identity politics.
Support for write-ins?
With both Shulli and Cooper participating in the general election as write-in candidates — a rather unique situation, according to experts — Republican party leaders are divided as to whether to embrace the write-ins or throw their full support behind the party’s primary winners.
Gene Truono, the state GOP chair, wrote a letter on Oct. 1, saying the party encourages “every Republican candidate to run an aggressive campaign,” and that voters should “support the candidates of their choice.”
The letter did not explicitly endorse the primary winners nor the write-in challengers.
Truono did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s multiple requests for comment about his letter. Brandon Brice, the state GOP treasurer, said “anybody can run for office,” but he is supporting the two primary winners in November.
But a week after Truono’s letter, the five Republican Party regional committee chairs – who represent the smaller organizations that report up to the state committee – wrote their own letter urging voters to cast their ballots for Katz and Arminio, the two candidates who will be listed by name on the November ballot.
Voting for write-in candidates “splits the conservative vote and risks handing easy victories to Democrat incumbents,” they wrote in a cosigned letter.
Tom Molnar, chair of the Sussex County Republican Committee, said he “really disagreed” with Truono’s statement. He felt the need to make sure voters rally around the chosen party candidates.
Brent Burdge, the Northern New Castle County Republican Committee Chair who is also running for a State Senate seat in November, similarly said he understands that some voters don’t agree with choosing candidates who are less conservative and aim to appeal to a broader coalition, like Katz. But voting for the primary winners is the only way to “make the progress in the state that we’d like to see,” he said.
Miller, the American University professor, described the split between Truono and the county party chairs as logical. Miller said the county chairs are focused on winning as many votes for the party as possible, while state leadership doesn’t want to “be on the losing side of the battle,” and ruin future relationships with one candidate or another.
Katz and Arminio both told Spotlight Delaware they are focused on running their own campaigns, rather than the distraction of their primary opponents who decided to write-in.
Meanwhile, Cooper and Shulli both acknowledged that it’s a long shot for them to win in November, but they view their write-in campaigns as making a statement about the direction the party should go in the future.
“I’m under no illusion that a miracle will happen, and I will win,” Shulli said. “But a write-in candidate keeps the conversation going, and we are going to have a definite conversation after Nov. 3.”
At the state level, voters largely seem to have fallen in line behind primary winners for Delaware’s General Assembly. Though one post-primary disagreement has broken out over controversial former state lawmaker John Atkins, who won a close primary against Army veteran Doug Conaway for a Millsboro-area state representative seat.
Since the primary, some voters have urged others to opt for the Democratic candidate, Ryan Stuckey, despite the Millsboro district leaning heavily Republican.
Finding a party identity
While it’s not unprecedented for Delaware Republican Party primary voters to choose a different candidate than who the party endorsed at its convention, or for candidates to run write-in campaigns, the complicated dynamics of this election cycle are likely to spur some internal reflection for the party, experts said.
Many Delaware GOP leaders rejected the idea that the often nationally used labels of moderate versus MAGA Republicans apply to Delaware politics.
Jane Brady, who served as the most recent Republican Attorney General in Delaware from 1995-2005 and a former chair of the state party, said Delaware Republicans’ ideology has been consistent since she became involved in the 1970s.
“They all try to say, ‘Oh, well you’re just MAGA,’” she said. “We’ve always been patriots. We’ve always been pro-Second Amendment.”
Brice, the state GOP treasurer, said he, too, views the future of the Delaware Republican Party as being less about choosing a far-right or moderate bent, and more about encouraging candidates of diverse backgrounds to run.
This election cycle, Brice said, the party has five Black candidates and a handful of women running, which is more diversity than the party has had in past election cycles. The current Republican caucus in the General Assembly is all white and includes just one female state representative.
“We’re the real party of diversity,” Brice said. “It’s important that our state party looks like our state.”
Nationally, much of the Republican strategy this election cycle has focused on the candidates President Donald Trump endorsed, and the candidates who have subtly tried to distance themselves from some of the president’s less popular policies.
Marc Meredith, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said the election dynamics in Delaware are unique because President Trump has not weighed in on any of the Republican candidates, like he has in other states.
Meredith argued the Delaware GOP’s relative independence from Trump’s influence lends itself to more turmoil, as state party members must decide amongst themselves whether to opt for the more moderate or MAGA-leaning candidates.
“Parties are inevitably fighting these battles, where on the one hand there are people who are largely focused on electability,” he said. “But you often hear people pushing back, saying, ‘No, we should run on our principles, and we’ll be able to motivate the base to show up to vote.”
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
