The Democratic Governor Fighting With His Own Party

Delaware is a small state. If its entire population moved to Texas, the resulting city would be bigger than Fort Worth but smaller than Dallas. It’s one of only a handful of states to have more U.S. senators than congressional districts.

Moreover, Delaware’s political culture has been compared to a Tupperware party: Public officials are routinely nice to each other because they probably shop at the same grocery store or have kids on the same soccer team. “Everyone’s dated, mated, or related,” Delawareans like to joke.

I was recently on the phone with a state official who had to hang up because he was being pulled over by a state trooper for a missing taillight on his trailer; he called me back 15 minutes later and told me the trooper was his cousin.

There was a time when this all felt a little too cloistered for Matt Meyer, the state’s Democratic governor, who took office in January. As a fifth grader at Wilmington Friends School, Meyer became captivated by an image of a snow-capped mountain straddling the equator in Africa. Years later, as he was flying into Nairobi, Kenya, he realized that Mount Kilimanjaro was actually in neighboring Tanzania. He stayed for a while in Kenya anyway, starting a sustainable footwear company called Ecosandals.

After some additional globe-trotting, including a year as a diplomat in Mosul during the Iraq War, he returned to the U.S. and worked variously as a teacher and a lawyer. In 2016, he won the race for New Castle County executive, becoming the top elected official in Delaware’s most populous county (which, since the state only has three counties, is also its third smallest).

He says he was motivated by a drive to fight inequality. “I got so pissed off as a Delaware kid who had tremendous opportunities growing up here and coming home and seeing that a lot of these stark inequities that I’d seen in Kenya and Iraq were just as bad miles from where I grew up,” Meyer says. “I have this frustration inside me, this sense that things really need to change. People call it being an outsider.”

The Outsider Governor

Last spring, barred from seeking a third term as county executive, Meyer decided to run for governor. Positioning himself as an outsider, he handily beat two others in the three-way Democratic primary.

His top opponent was Bethany Hall-Long, the sitting lieutenant governor and the favored candidate of much of the Democratic Party establishment, including Gov. John Carney, who later became the mayor of Wilmington. Meyer won the general election by a healthy margin too, extending the Democrats’ streak of winning races for governor that stretches back to 1993. (Democrats have had trifecta control of the state government since 2009.)

As governor, Meyer has big ambitions to improve the state’s education and health-care systems. To see them through, he’ll have to sort out his relationships with his own party’s legislative leaders, which, during his first nine months in office, have been rocky at best.

In a small state like Delaware, Meyer says, “There’s a basic tenor of kindness, I like to think — of respect. But we’re a family, and there are family fights.”

The Delaware Way

“The Delaware Way” is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot, including — especially recently — by Gov. Meyer. Generally referring to the clubby, go-along-to-get-along atmosphere of the state’s politics, it can mean different things depending on who’s saying it and in what context. Sometimes it’s a good thing, such as when all the state’s leaders get into a room together and come to shared terms on an issue. Sometimes it’s a bad thing, like when nothing can happen without unanimous consent among the political class.

Meyer running for governor in the Democratic primary — even though he’d never been elected to state office before and it wasn’t his “turn” — was not the Delaware Way. Only one legislator, state Rep. Nnamdi Chukwuocha, publicly supported him in the primary.

Chukwuocha said he was impressed that someone with Meyer’s pedigree — degrees from Brown University and the University of Michigan, experience working in white-shoe law firms, overseas service as a diplomat — was teaching sixth grade in a poor section of Wilmington.

“He was there for the right reasons,” Chukwuocha says. “He could’ve been many other places, but he was there in a high-needs school addressing the needs of young Black males.”

Meyer says he’d initially wanted to teach because of the inequalities he’d seen while working in Kenya and the realization that racial and class inequalities were in some ways equally entrenched in parts of his hometown. He volunteered for Teach for America in the late 1990s and worked for several years at public schools in Washington, D.C. Two of those schools were temporarily closed at times because their roofs were collapsing, he says.

Many of the same issues — housing and food insecurity, health inequalities, violence — were apparent in Northeast Wilmington when he taught there in the 2010s. “I loved the directness of teaching,” Meyer says. “You stand up in front of a group of sixth graders, and by the end of class you know whether they learned it or not. There’s standardized tests and all these measures, but you know whether your lesson is working.”

Meyer beat the Democratic incumbent in the New Castle County executive primary race in 2016, campaigning as an ethics reformer against an officeholder who’d faced accusations of corruption — a dynamic that prefigured his later gubernatorial run. He won the general election on the same day that President Donald Trump was first elected.

It was an interesting time to run a county, and a window into the dissonance between local and national politics, Meyer says. He likes to note that local officials can win (or lose) support from residents of both parties based on how well they deliver services.

As county executive, Meyer used COVID-19 relief dollars to oversee the development of an emergency housing facility that later evolved into a hub of housing and homeless services called the Hope Center. He even won a regional Emmy award as executive producer on a short film about the project.

“It’s the most amazing training, because you get forehead-deep in issues that people care about that aren’t the issues you see on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC,” he says.

An Open Attack

By the time Meyer entered the gubernatorial primary, Hall-Long had been lieutenant governor for two terms under Carney, a popular Democrat. She was the clear frontrunner, with the backing of Carney, the Democratic Party and most elected leaders in the state. Given Carney's popularity, it didn't look like the most promising race to enter as a shake-up-the-system candidate. But when reports surfaced about campaign finance violations on Hall-Long’s campaign, Meyer held a press conference and called for an independent investigation, openly accusing her of corruption.

“You don’t see that typically in Delaware,” says Rhett Ruggerio, a lobbyist and consultant who has worked with Meyer. “It’s not super sharp elbows like in Philadelphia or New Jersey or New York.”

Meyer framed his primary win as a rebuke of the old Delaware Way, and it left some raw feelings between his circle and the other Democrats who’d backed Hall-Long. “It needs work,” Governor-turned-Mayor Carney said of his relationship with Meyer. (Carney’s office declined an interview request for this story.)

It’s not that Meyer is hard to like. Several Republicans in state and local offices in Delaware almost boast of being friendly with him, describing how they razz each other about their support for opposing sports teams, text during football games, and generally keep open lines of communication. Meyer presents a friendly figure in public, too, typically carrying his 6-foot-3-inch frame around in a pair of Nike basketball shoes. Pretty much everyone interviewed for this article referred to him as Matt.

“He’s completely normal. You don’t feel like he’s a governor when you talk to him,” Ruggerio says. “People like him a lot on a personal level. He’ll fight you. That’s not a secret. Sometimes that’s played out publicly and then people misunderstand his personality.”

Off to a Bad Start

In January, Hall-Long led the state in an interim capacity for the 10 days between when Carney left to become mayor and Meyer's inauguration as governor. That was enough time to kick off a power struggle between Meyer and the Democratic leaders in the state legislature.

As one of the first acts of her micro-term, Hall-Long submitted a list of nominations to serve on the board of the Port of Wilmington, the focus of a long-sought expansion project backed by organized labor. Within hours of taking office, Meyer sought to rescind the nominations. The legislature, which largely supported the nominees — “These were fantastic names,” says Brian Townsend, the state Senate majority leader — asked him to explain what legal authority he had to do that.

The issue ended up going to the state Supreme Court, which ruled that Meyer had the right to select nominees for the port board. Meyer interpreted it as a power play by the legislature: “For there to be an election result where somebody won and somebody didn’t win and for the state legislature to then say they’re siding with the person who didn’t win the election is a really bad look for the Democratic Party.”

It was an early rupture between the executive and the legislature that hasn’t really been smoothed over. Legislative leaders complain that Meyer’s office has been bad at communicating, hasn’t honored deals his office has negotiated, and generally has taken a high-handed approach to the job.

Townsend says that Meyer held a series of meetings with state leaders in the first days of his administration, but that the meetings were governed by a 10-minute egg timer.

“There are a lot of legislators who think the partnership could be much stronger,” Townsend says. “There could be a lot more outreach and collaboration with the governor directly or through staff. At some point, different approaches to governing beg the question of whether we really are aligned.”

Townsend says Meyer’s approach was apparent in his veto of two recent bills backed by state Democrats. One, related to marijuana legalization, would have limited county land use regulations designed to prevent marijuana retail stores from opening in certain areas. State Democrats felt some of the rules proposed by counties were going too far, essentially regulating marijuana out of business before legalization could even take place.

Legislators and staffers have said that Meyer’s office initially agreed to a deal before surprising them and backing out. He vetoed the bill and, attached to the veto, added his own legislative recommendations.

“You could have engaged on that months ago when legislators were working on it,” Townsend says. “That’s just not the way to do it.”

Meyer says the marijuana issue will “flesh itself out,” citing recent signals from county governments that they’d loosen the regulations they were seeking to put on retail stores. It’s an important issue, he says, but far from the most important one in the state.

He sees the tension with the legislature as an extension of his position in the primary campaign. “Not everybody is happy that I won as governor,” Meyer says. “And because I’m the first governor in this state in at least 50 years who has not been in a state-elected position before that, I think there’s a sense among some that ‘we need to teach him some lessons.’”

The Party Leader Regardless

In any event, Meyer is now Delaware Democrats’ standard-bearer. One of his allies and the director of his transition team, Evelyn Brady, was elected chair of the state Democratic Party in June.

In his first legislative session, Meyer inherited Carney's budget. His attempts to carry out a “budget reset” were only semi-successful, and lawmakers say he fell short of clearly stating what his priorities were in the negotiation process.

The next budget proposal will be fully his. He has started hinting at an ambitious education agenda that could include an overhaul of the state’s 80-year-old public school funding formula and higher pay for teachers. But he’s putting it together at a time when the federal government is carrying out cuts and programmatic changes that could make it hard for states to predict revenues and leave them holding the bag for federal safety-net programs.

Meyer and other Democratic leaders in the state say their past differences won’t stop them from working together. But that may be easier said than done.

“Party unity,” Brady says. “That’s the thing that’s going to take a little more time.”