On February 25, 2017, voters in the 10th district of the Delaware Senate voted in a special election to fill the seat left vacant by Democrat Bethany Hall-Long, the previous incumbent, who had resigned at the beginning of the year after having been elected lieutenant governor the preceding November. Democrat Stephanie Hansen, an environmental lawyer from Middletown who had in the past served a term as New Castle County Council president, won with 58.1 percent of the vote, defeating Republican opponent John Marino, who finished with 40.8 percent. Libertarian John Lanzendorfer, the only other candidate in the race, claimed the other 1.1 percent.
Republicans had hoped that their party could capitalize on gains they had made in the 2016 elections in a potentially vulnerable district, where, despite a Democratic edge in voter registration, Marino had lost to Hall-Long by less than 300 votes in the 2014 election. Hansen's victory ensured that Democrats retained control of the state senate, where they had been the majority party since 1976. Since Delaware's House of Representatives had been controlled by Democrats for the preceding eight years, and no Republican had served as governor since 1993, Democrats also preserved their trifecta. Delaware was at that time one of only five U.S. states where the Democratic party controlled the executive and legislative branches of government.
The race attracted significant national media attention and interest from Democrats outside of Delaware, who, along with several liberal political action committees and labor unions, contributed more money to Hansen's campaign than both Marino and Hall-Long had spent combined in their 2014 contest, conscious of their party's frequently poor performance in special elections. Ultimately, she raised over a million dollars, ten times as much as a Delaware state legislative race usually costs, and a new record for any state legislative race and any special election in Delaware. Marino also raised a large amount of money for a state legislative race, but was still outspent. There were formal complaints from both sides over apparent collusion between the campaigns and outside groups. Republicans were also unhappy after the election when it was reported that some voters had been under the age of 18 due to a loophole in a recently passed election law.
Democrats both inside and outside the state saw the contest as a chance to respond electorally to the presidency of Donald Trump, which had led to widespread protests since his inauguration the month before. While Hansen and Marino primarily campaigned on local issues, Hansen touched on national concerns in her advertising and speeches. Former Delaware U.S. Senator Joseph Biden, whose term as vice president had ended at the same time Trump was sworn in, not only appeared at Hansen's fundraisers and in her campaign ads, but went door-to-door with her as well. Hansen's victory margin and the 35.3 percent voter turnout, better than usual for a special election, were seen as validating hopes that opposition to Trump could motivate Democrats to vote and possibly lead to greater success later that year and in the 2018 national midterm elections.
Background
After Democratic dominance of the state in the late 19th century, neither party truly dominated Delaware politics for most of the 20th. That began to change in 1974, when Democrats gained control of the state senate and had held it ever since. The state's electoral votes for president had gone to Democrats ever since Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 and no Republican had served as governor since Dale E. Wolf's brief tenure at the beginning of the following year. William V. Roth's defeat in 2000 made him the last of his party to serve as one of the state's U.S. senators.
In 2008, with Delawarean Joseph Biden on the national ballot as the Democratic nominee for vice president, the state House swung to his party, and by 2010 Democrats had gained Delaware's sole seat in the U.S. House as well. Only Tom Wagner remained as the state auditor.
Starting with that year's elections, however, Republicans began regaining one state senate seat each election. By 2016, they had narrowed the Democratic advantage in the 21-member body to just two seats. That year's election created the possibility that the GOP could reclaim control when Patricia Blevins, the senate's president pro tempore, was narrowly upset by Anthony Delcollo in her suburban Wilmington district, and Bethany Hall-Long was elected lieutenant governor. She vacated her state senate seat to assume the position early in January 2017, requiring a special election to fill her seat in the 10th district.
The 10th Senate district
The state senate's 10th district is located in the western and southwestern areas of New Castle County, northernmost, most populous and politically the most Democratic of Delaware's three counties. It is a narrow strip, running north to south close to the state's western border with Maryland from just south of the University of Delaware campus in Newark, north of Interstate 95, through Glasgow, just west of Lums Pond State Park to Middletown and reaching east to the northwest vicinity of Odessa along Delaware Route 1, both of the latter south of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, which traditionally divides the state into northern and southern portions, the latter of which is more Republican-leaning. It is within commuting distance of Wilmington, Baltimore and Philadelphia by car and rail. Most of the district is either exurban residential subdivisions or worked fields, broken by occasional woodlots.
The 10th is a nominally Democratic district, with 45% of its registered voters affiliating with the party while only 28% are Republicans. However, that has in recent years not always translated into comfortable wins for Democratic candidates. In the 2014 elections, in the middle of a presidential term when Democrats are less likely to vote, Bethany Hall-Long, who had generally won easily since her initial election in 2008, had her closest victory, with less than 300 votes, under 2% of the total, separating her and Republican John Marino, a retired New York City police officer and realtor who had made the district his home. In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton had carried the district with 54% of the vote, less than a percentage point above her victory margin statewide. Blevins, defeated the previous November, represented a district with more than twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans.
Candidates
Before the date of the special election had been set, both parties had settled on candidates. In early December the state Republican Party announced it would nominate Marino for a second try at the seat. Before his narrow 2014 loss, he had also run a close race in 2010 for a state House seat held at the time by Rebecca Walker. He made his top campaign issue the purportedly stifling effect of one-party rule on Delaware and its citizens. One New Castle Democrat interviewed by the Wilmington News Journal, the state's largest newspaper, agreed, pointing out how Blevins had been appointed to lead the state's animal-welfare agency after her loss in the November election, despite possibly insufficient qualification for the job.
Democrats from the district committees in the 10th district met to hear from six potential candidates. Earl Jaques Jr., a state representative from a district in the Glasgow area whose winning electoral record had made him an early favorite for the nomination, had taken himself out of the running early on, citing a desire to spend more time with his family. After the group of 25 chose Hansen, New Castle County party chair Betsy Maron formally announced her as the nominee. Both candidates waited for the election date to be set to formally file their candidacies with the state's Department of Elections.
At the beginning of 2017, a third candidate, credit card fraud investigator Joseph Lanzendorfer, was also announced on the Libertarian line.
Campaign
On January 17, 10 days after the state legislative session began, Hall-Long was sworn in as lieutenant governor and resigned her seat the same day. She retained her role in the senate, however, since as with many lieutenant governors and the U.S. vice president she is also the body's president. While it is a mostly ceremonial post, with the president pro tempore exercising the practical powers and authority of the job, one of those responsibilities that falls to the lieutenant governor is setting the date for special elections to vacated seats.
A week after taking her new office, Hall-Long finally announced that the special election for her former seat would be held a month and a day later, on February 25. Marino made an issue of the length of time it took to set the date, connecting it to one of his general campaign platforms that Delaware and its residents had suffered from eight unbroken years of Democratic control and it was time for voters to put an end to it. "Democrats have known for months what the date is going to be," he charged. "It is another example of the Dover insiders taking advantage of their power. They get the inside information."
Hansen made no response of her own other than to say she was happy she could finally give voters she had been talking to when visiting their houses a date. She did, however, criticize the senate minority for blocking new governor John Carney's appointment of former federal Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator Shawn Garvin to head the state's Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, whose previous role in the Obama Administration they had objected to. Hansen likened it to the obstructionist politics of their fellow Republicans in Congress.
While the election was for state office, both candidates appealed to the national political mood. Upon being announced as the Republican nominee, Marino told radio station WDDE that the presidential election a month earlier had revealed "a sense of frustration and disappointment, and a lack of trust with our elected officials and our leadership". His campaign slogan, "Make Delaware First Again", echoed Trump's "Make America Great Again", although he denied any intent to evoke the new president, calling on voters to stay focused on Delaware. "Casting a vote out of frustration of what's going on at the federal level is not the right direction to go," he told National Public Radio. Some Republican voters, tired of protests against Trump and his Cabinet picks, agreed with him.
Hansen, speaking at a local Women's March the day after Donald Trump's inauguration, said "[h]ate speech, divisiveness, exclusivity, misogyny will not rule the day because we won't let it." Later she told The New York Times that many of her encounters with Democratic voters began with "venting sessions" where they expressed their anger about the actions of Trump and the Republicans in Washington. "I will come up to houses and ... people are glued to their TV sets because you never know what craziness is going to pop up during the day."
Debate
The national issues shared the stage with local ones when the candidates debated on February 1. Supporters of both Hansen and Marino dominated the audience at the event, sponsored by news radio station WDEL-FM, whose Alan Loudell served as moderator, at Middletown High School, cheering and booing responses. The two major party candidates differentiated themselves on abortion, with Marino opposing it as "ripping a child out of a mother's womb" while Hansen and Lanzendorfer both said it was a decision that should be left to a woman and her physician. Marino called for Delaware to adopt a right-to-work law to improve its job creation, saying it need not be seen as anti-union, while Hansen opposed it as "the right to work for less."