Commentary: Changing Delaware primary date is ill-advised proposal
The proposal to move Delaware’s primary election from September to April would wreck a nomination process that has worked well for 45 years, stifle challengers and create immeasurable opportunities for mischief.
Gone would be the feverish campaigning that has marked even-numbered summers since 1976. The primary would be buried on a weekday 2½ months before the legislature has finished its work. Fewer will vote — because they won’t know how their legislators will decide on the year’s most important issues — and fewer incumbents will face serious challenge.
The bill should be set aside, so senators can consider fully its implications, which are not pretty.
The end-of-summer primary is uniquely Delaware and uniquely effective. Titans have been toppled, careers launched, and louts evicted from office after upstarts have spent the warm weather collecting supporters and making their cases. Some legislators have complained that primaries can rob them of vacation time. Careful lawmakers know that the threat of a primary helps them keep focus.
Powerful legislators have been removed in late-summer primaries. Last year’s Senate president pro tempore, Bear Democrat David McBride, came to the General Assembly by unseating Robert Byrd in a 1978 primary. McBride was defeated in a 2020 primary by Marie Pinkney, in a masterful grassroots campaign that could hardly have been replicated in March.
Another rising star, Bryan Townsend, D-Newark, earned his ticket to the Senate by ousting a previous president pro tempore, Tony DeLuca, in a 2012 primary campaign that drew on the people power that becomes available during summer break but is scarce when the snow is melting.
They join many other representatives — Sean Matthews, D-Brandywine; Lyndon Yearick, R-Magnolia; Larry Lambert, D-Claymont; Eric Morrison, D-Glasgow; Stephanie Bolden, D-Wilmington; Nnamdi Chukwuocha, D-Wilmington; and Madinah Wilson-Anton, D-Newark — who built summer campaigns to defeat incumbents. So did many important lawmakers in earlier eras — Jane Maroney, Helene Keeley, Mary Boudart, Al Plant (twice), Charlie Copeland and Dutch Burton among them. Nearly all of Wilmington’s mayors in the last 30 years — Mike Purzycki, Jim Baker and Jim Sills — defeated their predecessors in primary days that turned the city into one large block party, fueled by a summer of street-level networking.
A September primary lets voters see a lawmaker’s complete scorecard. Any controversial votes or late-night deals at the end of the session are known to the public. When the filing deadline is in July, a lawmaker can’t duck accountability for votes in June. If the primary were shifted to the early spring, special interests could nudge wavering legislators into votes they could not justify in a spirited primary two months later. The late primary protects the public interest.
Even more insidiously, the pending bill would move the filing deadline for a candidate to February — before almost any action has begun in the session. Challengers would have to canvass on icy sidewalks.
These accelerated deadlines would encourage another form of mischief. If a candidate withdraws after the filing deadline, his or her replacement is not selected by the primary voters but by party insiders. The truncated calendar would enable legislators to bypass the electorate to select their successors.
Supporters of the change to April proffer several rationales. One is to increase turnout in Delaware’s presidential primary. Yet, the presidential primary is inevitably irrelevant in most years, since the nominees are usually decided by late April. When the presidential nomination remains in doubt, turnout is robust. In 2016, when both parties were jousting into April, over 175,000 voted in the presidential primary, without the need for any sideshow.
Another excuse is the claim that primary campaigns exhaust the winners and impair their chances in November. History provides scant evidence. Almost every statewide official has won a spirited primary en route to office. Tom Carper, Mike Castle, Chris Coons, Lisa Blunt Rochester, Jack Markell, Trini Navarro, Ken Simpler, S.B. Woo, Matt Denn, Chip Flowers, Jane Brady, Charlie Oberly, Bethany Hall-Long, Kathy Jennings, Dave Levinson, Karen Weldin Stewart and Kathy McGuiness all did it. Candidates aren’t limited by pitch count. Good candidates supported by healthy parties will leverage their September victories into a flying start to November, particularly in this digital era.
This poorly conceived bill has been stopped in the Senate several times in recent years. It should be buried again, for good. The reasons transcend party. My former state senator, Greg Lavelle, for two decades one of Delaware’s leading Republicans, has published strong arguments against the bill. As a longtime Democrat, I join this opposition and hope that legislators of both parties abandon this dangerous proposal, which would unnecessarily erode accountability and citizen choice.
Chuck Durante, a Wilmington lawyer and former Delaware State News sportswriter, was parliamentarian of the Democratic State Committee
