‘We are the third party in this state’: Swept again in statewide races, Delaware GOP grapples for ways to regain relevance

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Sipping from a glass of straight bourbon, Hank McCann sounded a resigned tone with traces of hope Tuesday night while awaiting Delaware’s election results.

McCann, Delaware’s national Republican committeeman, was holding court outside the ballroom of the Christiana Hilton, where his party’s gubernatorial candidate Mike Ramone, U.S. Senate hopeful Eric Hansen, and several local candidates mingled with about 100 supporters.

McCann knew winning a statewide seat was a serious longshot in a state where Democrats have held all nine Delaware posts since 2018, and hold nearly a 2 to 1 voter registration advantage over Republicans, but he still saw possible paths to victory for a couple of GOP candidates.

“The past couple of elections, we have been building. We’ve been getting closer on our percentages and I think that maybe tonight might bring a couple of surprises,” McCann said, specifying Ramone and lieutenant governor nominee Ruth Briggs King as potential winners.

“But it’s a tough road.”

And once again, it was a road Delaware Republicans could not successfully navigate.

Democrats cruised to victory in all five statewide seats up for grabs, with the margin of victory from 10 to 17 percentage points, and also increased their stranglehold on the state legislature.

Ramone, who after the polls closed had told WHYY News he would triumph by between 6,000 and 25,000 votes, lost by 60,500 votes out of 499,000 cast. Democrat Matt Meyer won 56% to Ramone’s 44%.

Briggs King, who stepped down from her Sussex County state House seat in 2023 because she moved out of the district and then ran statewide this year, had the best showing, but still lost by 10 percentage points to Democratic state Sen. Kyle Evans Gay of Brandywine Hundred.

Three GOP political newcomers seeking high office — U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hansen, U.S. House hopeful John Whalen, and insurance commissioner nominee Ralph Taylor — were simply trounced by their Democratic foes.

The state’s dominant party also maintained its 15-6 supermajority lead in the state Senate and gained one seat in the House for a 27-14 advantage. Dems also won the races for Wilmington mayor and New Castle County Executive with no Republican foe.

GOP member Janyce Colmery, who lives in Ramone’s House district in New Castle County’s Pike Creek area, was in disbelief as the results became apparent, but summed up the reasons in one succinct sentence.

“We are outnumbered,’’ Colmery said.

Party faithful short on specifics about how to rebound

So how does the Delaware GOP, which hasn’t had a governor since 1992 or a member of Congress since 2010, mount a rebound to even be seriously competitive in statewide races, let alone win them?

Party faithful who gathered Tuesday night at the Hilton near Newark offered various thoughts, but were short on specifics and tangible ways to grow their numbers. Still, they accepted their current diminished status and celebrated live reports that former President Donald Trump looked to be regaining the White House.

Colmery, a retired respiratory therapist who now sells real estate, stated the obvious. “You try to flip the Democrats and the independents,’’ she said.

But how the GOP could close the registration gap and attract candidates that appeal in large numbers to Democrats and non-affiliated voters, was a far thornier question for Colmery. Instead of offering concrete strategic tactics, she responded by criticizing Meyer and current Gov. John Carney, who will become mayor of Wilmington in January. Both are Democrats.

Colmery also cited the Democrats’ near-total control of Wilmington, where few Republicans even bother to seek office.

“Wilmington’s a big problem because that’s never going to change,’’ she said. “I mean, they just brought in Carney as their mayor. Are you kidding me?”

She said Wilmington’s families raise their children in the Democratic tradition. “That’s all they know,’’ she said. “And no one’s educating them on what’s actually going on in the world. They don’t know.”

However, Colmery’s inflammatory and unsubstantiated rhetoric about the residents in Delaware’s largest city is largely irrelevant statewide because Wilmington only has about 7% of the state’s population of roughly 1 million people.

Besides, Wilmington was overwhelmingly Democratic in the early 1990s, when Delaware had barely 700,000 residents and Republicans held several statewide posts and controlled the state House.

The reality is that far more of the 300,000 new residents over the last three decades have been Democrats, and they have increasingly voted for members of their own party.

Wilmington’s influence on elections was a theme repeated by several Republicans in the crowd Tuesday, including John Zeron, who owns a Newark chimney sweeping company.

Even though Sussex and Kent counties have higher poverty rates than New Castle County, and some towns in Sussex and Kent have higher poverty rates than Wilmington, Zeron echoed Colmery’s sentiments.

He said too many New Castle County and Wilmington-area residents receive benefits from government entitlement programs, so they don’t see the Republican party as a viable political home.

But for Republicans to gain legions of new voters statewide, Zeron said the party needs to focus on people like him.

“What Republicans need to do is really focus on the businessman,” Zeron said before immediately pivoting to a grievance about Democratic-led regulatory rules.

“I’m a business owner and I’ve only got three employees. I would like to have more employees. I would like to grow my business, but the cards are stacked against me.”

‘We don’t want open borders. We want our guns, our country.’

Josie Herninko wasn’t expecting wins Tuesday night, however.

“But I think maybe in a few years, if we keep at it with the grassroots movement, if the people really get out there and really work, we might have a chance, maybe in a couple of years,’’ said Herninko, a retiree.

But while Trump and his Make America Great Again movement won the nation’s popular vote as well as Pennsylvania and six other so-called swing states to regain the presidency, what message would Herninko use to attract voters to Republican red in blue Delaware?

“You gotta just go out there and let them know what your party stands for, what Republican means,’’ she said. “We’re a party of conservatives. We believe in the Constitution. We believe in the rights. We don’t want open borders. We want our guns, our country, that’s what we want.’’

Julianne Murray, the state’s GOP chairperson and a former unsuccessful candidate for governor and attorney general, acknowledged the steep hurdles her party must overcome to once again be a force in Delaware.

“We are the third party in this state,’’ she said, noting that the GOP’s 209,000 registered voters trail not only the Democrats’ 354,000, but also the 228,000 who are not affiliated with any party or belong to a minor party.

“Those numbers are just super tough to deal with,’’ Murray said. “So the pitch has to be, that I’ll be making, is that we are right on the policies.”

She said progressive Democrats are exerting far too much pull on the ruling party but as of now, “people aren’t suffering enough [from their governance]. So I’m going to continue to say, ‘Look, the Republican party is alive.’ People have to do some soul searching and kind of figure it out. We also have to put a concerted effort into bringing the unaffiliated back in.”

McCann, a retired general in the Delaware Army National Guard, said the march will be a long one, and noted that from 1969 to 1970, his party held all statewide elective seats.

“So it took 50 years for us to lose it. I’m betting it’s gonna take us 25 to get this back,’’ McCann said. “You don’t get it all back in one day. It’s a building process. It’s one person at a time.”