Viewpoint: Delaware’s business community is being hustled
September 8, 2026
Delaware’s business community is being hustled, and you are writing the checks.
Here is the play. A candidate comes to you before the primary. He understands payroll and margin, he says the right things about small business, and you are told he is the one who can actually win. So you write the check. Then he gets to Dover, votes with his caucus every time it matters, and you do not hear from him again until the next cycle.
That is not bad luck. That is a business decision you made, and it is not paying. In other states donors at least get a head fake, a candidate who runs to the middle and governs from the left. Here nobody has to move. They were already there.
On August 1, the annual tax on a Delaware LLC went from $300 to $400, a 33 percent increase, with higher filing fees behind it. Look at who voted for that. Then look at your own donor list. There is more overlap than you want there to be.
Roughly 30 percent of the General Fund comes from companies registered here, and state forecasters expect that money flat through 2028. Spending will not be flat. When revenue stops growing, somebody pays. Nobody in Dover wants to say who, so I will: I think Delaware gets a sales tax before anybody admits one is coming.
You will not see it coming either, because the real debate happens inside the majority caucus before a bill is ever public. When a majority needs the other side’s votes, it takes your call. When it does not, your call is a courtesy.
Ask yourself how many people in Dover are loudly fighting to keep business in this state. Not privately sympathetic. Loud. The Delaware Way says we handle these things quietly, over lunch, without embarrassing anybody. The Delaware Way is how you get a 33 percent increase with nobody’s name on it.
Every chamber in this state, including the State Chamber, the New Castle County Chamber, and the Delaware Black Chamber, has members paying that bill. Small shops feel it first and minority-owned startups feel it worst, because licensing and fees land hardest on the people with the least cushion.
Here is where this goes if nothing changes. Businesses leave. Unemployment rises. Crime follows. That is not a theory I am floating. It is Chester. It is Camden. It is Flint. I live in Wilmington and I would rather not add it to that list.
This is not a political question for me. If one-party rule in Dover produced people who fought for employers and small business owners, I would not be writing this. In 2012 a Republican governor and legislature in Kansas zeroed out the income tax on LLCs, blew a hole in the budget, and raised the sales tax to fill it. Nobody stopped them either.
None of this requires a revolution. Democrats hold the Senate 15 to 6 and the House 27 to 14. Three-fifths of a chamber is what raises taxes and overrides a veto, and in the House that is 25 votes. Do the math yourself. A handful of seats is the difference between a majority that has to ask and one that never does.
Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street was a criminal. He was still right that a business is allowed to act in its own interest. Delaware’s business community has forgotten how to do that.
So stop. Stop funding candidates who will not say your industry’s name out loud. Ask every one of them, on the record, what they will cut or what they will raise when franchise revenue stays flat through 2028, and publish the answers and the refusals. Then find people willing to run in 2028 who do not need the question explained to them.
And know what you are asking them for. Lower the cost of employing people here. Put real incentives behind companies that stay. Cut the licensing stack a startup climbs before it opens the door, which is the barrier that lands hardest on minority owners. None of that is complicated. It is just nobody’s priority.
You do not have to sell out to win. You have been told you do, by people who benefit from you believing it.
Brandon Brice is Secretary of the Delaware Republican Party. He is also chair of the Fair Choice Delaware Initiative, Chief Development Officer for the Consortium of Catholic Academies, and Founder of Fix the Damn Schools Delaware. He lives in Wilmington.
