Delaware is Joe Biden’s home state. He represented it in the U.S. Senate from 1973 to 2009, before two terms as vice president and one as president — the only Delawarean to hold the office. The state has voted Democratic for president in every election since 1992, and in 2024 it did so again by 14.7 points. That margin was down from 19.0 in 2020, a 4.3-point shift toward Donald Trump that matched the national move almost exactly — Delaware tracking the country rather than running ahead of or behind it.
The state has only three counties, and in 2024 they split along a north-to-south line. New Castle County, which holds Wilmington and the Philadelphia-facing suburbs where most Delawareans live, voted Democratic by 32.6 points. Kent County, around the capital at Dover, came in at D+2.0. Sussex County — the farmland and Atlantic beach towns of the south — voted Republican by 11.0. The same education gradient that has tracked the national divide runs the length of the state: 35.8 percent of Delaware adults hold a bachelor’s degree, and the share is highest in the New Castle suburbs that hold the Democratic margin.
Delaware’s other identity is corporate. More than a million companies — among them most of the Fortune 500 — are legally incorporated in the state, drawn by its Court of Chancery and a body of corporate law built over more than a century. The population underneath is 1.02 million: 58.1 percent White, 21.4 percent Black, and 11.0 percent Hispanic or Latino, with a median household income of $84,954, above the national $80,734. It is the sixth-oldest state by median age, at 42.4, and among the least religiously affiliated — 58.8 percent claim no religion, the 12th-highest share of the fifty.
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