Within the Margin

In the end, the margin was what it should have been: a comfortable Democratic victory to hold Senate District 10 and with it control of the Delaware Senate. Stephanie Hansen captured a little more than 58% of the vote compared to just under 41% for John Marino, with the Libertarian candidate grabbing the remaining 1.12%.

As I wrote last night, Democrats held most of the advantages here and had to win. But winning the easy ones has not been the party’s forte of late, and Republicans had the strongest scenario they could ask for: a candidate with an interesting profile and background, who had nearly captured the seat for them in 2014, and who was outspent but with sufficient funds to be competitive.

This was not 2014, though: the enthusiasm gap that cost Democrats so dearly that year was not present in this campaign. Helpfully, we can quantify that: Hansen received 7,314 votes today, compared to her predecessor Bethany Hall-Long’s winning haul of 6,230 votes in 2014. Let that sink in for a moment: the Democratic candidate won over a thousand more votes in a February special election for a state senate seat, with nothing else on the ballot, than in the November 2014 election with U.S. Senate and House seats on the line. While one should never, ever read too much into an individual special election results, it seems reasonable to conclude that the Trump presidency has sharpened the focus of  Democrats at the grassroots level and helped them understand that resistance takes place up and down the ballot. That’s how you get 250 people to turn up and volunteer to canvass for a state legislative race on a wintry Saturday, as Hansen did a few weekends ago. And that’s how you blow past your last general election number in a given district.

There are many miles to go on the way back to respectability for Democrats in our state legislatures. Tom Perez and Keith Ellison, now the chair and deputy chair of the national party, have vowed a bottom-up focus that would make wins like this plenty common in the years to come. Hopefully Stephanie Hansen, her hundreds of volunteers, and over 7,000 voters have taken the first step in a very long process.