OPINION: My grandfather was Delaware's last Republican governor. I'm supporting Harris

My grandfather was Delaware’s last Republican governor and lieutenant governor.

I’m named after him. It’s a running joke in my family that if I ever hold public office, I won’t be the first Dale E. Wolf to do it.

Grandsons of President Jimmy Carter and President John F. Kennedy helped launch the second night of this year’s Democratic National Convention. If my own grandfather were still around, I have no doubt that he’d be voting for the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.

I wish the contemporary Republican Party were far more reflective of Granddad’s values. As Democratic Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware said in a statement after my grandfather passed away in 2021, “It was an honor and a joy to know and work with Dale. … After serving our state, he retired with no enemies — something most of us can only aspire to.”

Granddad retired from politics in 1993, the same year I was born. He never stopped being a Republican. I grew up to spend half a decade working in Democratic politics. I worked for a consulting firm and a PAC, plus various individual campaigns on the state, local, and national levels.

In 2016, Granddad and I both voted for Hillary Clinton. That year, I asked him what he thought of Donald Trump. Granddad heaved an enormous sigh. He talked for a while about how parties can change, and sometimes change is huge. He made clear that he hadn’t abandoned his party, but his party had abandoned him.

I’ve done a lot of research since 2016, trying to figure out what happened. During law school I took a course in immigration law. I learned in detail just how different the Republican Party used to be on that issue.

“While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

President Ronald Reagan delivered those words in 1989, during his final speech in office, after he spent nearly ten years pushing to make America’s immigration system both more controlled and more compassionate.

During his 1980 campaign, Reagan declared that “the United States and our neighbors, particularly our neighbor to the south, should have a better understanding and a better relationship than we’ve ever had,” and he said that our government hadn’t “been sensitive enough to our size and our power.” In office, he signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which both strengthened border security and offered amnesty to any undocumented immigrant who had entered the United States before 1982.

My grandfather voted for Reagan twice. At the dawn of this millennium, Granddad wrote our entire family a letter in which he discussed his ancestors crossing the sea to immigrate to America.

Accepting the Republican nomination in 1980, Reagan asked his audience “to trust that American spirit which knows no ethnic, religious, social, political, regional, or economic boundaries; the spirit that burned with zeal in the hearts of millions of immigrants from every corner of the Earth who came here in search of freedom.”

Reagan stood clearly against what we would today call Trumpian policies. “You don’t build a nine-foot fence along the border between two friendly nations,” he said during a 1980 campaign speech. An early draft of this same speech contained language which would have been particularly inflammatory during the Cold War: “We cannot erect a Berlin Wall across the southern border.”

Accepting the Republican nomination in 2024, Trump reiterated his longstanding commitment to building such a wall.

Accepting this year’s Democratic nomination, Kamala Harris declared that Americans “can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system. We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border.”

Harris supports the bipartisan border legislation that Trump publicly torpedoed. In this, she echoes Reagan’s practicality. “I’m willing to take what I can get,” he once said about politics. “You have to take what you can get and go out and get some more next year.”

Today the best champion of a Reaganesque immigration vision is Vice President Harris. I’m certain my grandfather would have recognized this, and he would have voted for her with joy.

Dale Wolf is the grandson of former Delaware Gov. Dale Wolf.

This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Dale Wolf grandson: Voting for Kamala Harris