Races to Watch: Republican Kim Hoey Stevenson faces incumbent Democrat Russ Huxtable for 6th District State Senate seat

Delaware is the fastest-growing state in the mid-Atlantic region, and the 6th Senate district is at the center of that population boom.

The resulting pressures on fragile coastal ecosystems, farmers, road and sewer infrastructure, the local healthcare system and housing supply — and the regular threat of flooding — are front-of-mind for district residents, and both Democrat Russ Huxtable and Republican Kim Hoey Stevenson know it.

"The issues are overdevelopment, roads, medical; can we can we get doctors?" Stevenson said. "Those are the questions, the same things that come up over and over again."

Stevenson argues that the job of the 6th District’s Senator is principally to help coordinate between state agencies and Sussex County as both attempt to balance development pressures with long-term planning.

"Land use is the county's lane," Stevenson said. "The roads and school funding are mostly the state’s lane. But those two need to be intersecting."

That isn’t a controversial goal. Huxtable says better-managing development in the district is a bipartisan priority and one that is as relevant to newcomers as it is to longtime residents.

"It doesn't matter if they've just arrived here or if they've been here for a while; they have the same concern," Huxtable said. "I equate this to a stove. Imagine cooking dinner on a six-burner stove. I think they've got every single burner turned on high, and something's burning, and folks know it, and so I think there needs to be some knobs and some better coordination between county and state."

The 6th District race isn’t marred by personal attacks or predictable partisan bickering. The candidates have instead leaned largely on their resumes to draw support.

For Huxtable, the highlight of his resume is a two-year record in the General Assembly. He cites his leading role in convincing Delaware’s Department of Education to allow school districts like Cape Henlopen to build new schools to fit projected growth in student populations, as well as his work to expand Delaware’s affordable housing development fund budget from $4 million to $31.5 million in 2023 — the first expansion of the program’s budget since 1987.

Stevenson points to her time on the Sussex County Planning Commission and as a communications director for Delaware’s Senate Republicans.

"I'm the only candidate who has county and state experience, so I know who to call, and I do that now," Stevenson said. "People call me now and say, ‘Hey, how does this work?’"

That absence of partisan bluster is mostly to be expected in a relatively moderate district that first elected a Democrat – Huxtable – two years ago.

Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by roughly eight percentage points in the district, but Democrats also held a registration advantage — albeit a smaller one — when former Sen. Ernie Lopez won the district in 2018. Neither party can claim a majority of the district’s voters; independent and unaffiliated voters are nearly as numerous as Republicans.

Both candidates say some of the most recent efforts by Democratic state lawmakers to set new guardrails for development have been well-received among 6th District voters, despite those rules placing some limits on the authority of local governments, often a red line in Delaware politics.

This year, for instance, state lawmakers voted to require towns and counties to factor climate change into future comprehensive plans. Huxtable says voters’ feedback on that requirement has been overwhelmingly positive.

Stevenson takes no issue with that law, which she says is both in the interest of the district and redundant in Sussex County; the county began considering the impacts of climate change in its comprehensive plans as early as 2018.

Indeed, Stevenson says her voting record on the county’s planning commission reflected the need to take coastal flooding into account when approving new developments.

"On my last night on the planning commission, I presented the denial of a neighborhood called Stillwater. Where they were going to build it, the entrance was going to be underwater several times a year," Stevenson said. "I couldn't in good faith say, ‘Yes, we should definitely put 300 homes in a place where, if somebody has a heart attack one day, the ambulance can't get to them.'"

Huxtable emphasizes the role of public transportation — and the land use changes needed to make public transportation a viable option for more district residents — as a part of sustainable planning in Sussex County, both as a means to mitigate carbon emissions and as a cost-saving alternative for residents struggling with rising living expenses.

"We need to create more sustainable developments," Huxtable said. "If we can encourage public transportation to have less reliance on vehicles, that would be good for the working class, because owning a vehicle is expensive."

The candidates also align on the subject of Delaware’s open space and farmland preservation programs, which both argue are chronically underfunded, though they offer different suggestions for where the state might find dollars to redirect to the programs.

"Right now, it's a flat ten million a year for open space and ag land preservation put into that program from the realty transfer tax," Huxtable said. "I would prefer to see a percentage of those transfer taxes be put into open space and ag land preservation kind of counterbalance the reason why we're getting those funds because we are developing farmlands and open space."

Huxtable also pointed to a bill he sponsored this year that provided state matching dollars for crop insurance, a complement to the state’s agricultural land preservation program intended to help keep farms profitable.

Stevenson, however, suggests the state should redirect a larger portion of its unclaimed property revenue, which accounted for just over 6% of Delaware’s total revenue in 2023, to the preservation programs. She says that investment would offer a better alternative to the current use of that revenue to feed the state’s general fund.

Neither candidate is eager to engage in open partisanship, but despite their outward embrace of bipartisanship, neither is running as an independent. Indeed, Stevenson says she does not anticipate breaking with fellow Republicans on any key votes should she win in November, and she joined fellow Republicans in criticizing the Delaware Department of Natural Resources rule adopted last year requiring that 82% of new cars and trucks sent to Delaware be zero-emissions vehicles.

"Look, whether you believe that electric vehicles are the future or not, and they might very well be, that law became law without a single legislator voting on it," Stevenson said. "They put it on the state register and boom, the EV mandate was what became law. That's wrong. That shouldn't happen."

Huxtable, in contrast, voted in favor of a bill requiring new single- and multi-family housing to include electric vehicle charging infrastructure in 2023; Gov. Carney signed that bill into law four months before DNREC finalized its zero-emissions vehicles rule. He says that on some fronts — including on sustainable development policy — the state may need to step in to prevent local politics from derailing key priorities.

"If the state needs to assist a local jurisdiction by being the bad guy, to let the local legislator say, 'the state's making me do it,'" Huxtable said. "Then maybe we need to do the right thing and not be afraid that we may lose an election because we did the right thing."

Despite some policy differences like these, the national political climate does not appear to have trickled down into the race for Delaware’s 6th Senate district, and both candidates appear to prefer a resume contest over an ideological showdown.