Delaware Gov. Matt Meyer beat his party’s favored candidate in last year’s primary. He’s still finding his footing with the Democratic legislature.
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.