Secession Speakeasy #194: A Maryland Delegate Floats the State of Mardelva for the Eastern Shore

Released August 24, 2026.

Professor Wall (Grant M. Dahl) and the Secession Minstrel take up Delegate Tom Hutchinson’s amendment in the Maryland House of Delegates that would have put a nonbinding question to voters in the nine Eastern Shore counties this November: whether to separate from Maryland. Hutchinson, a Republican from the Shore, offered it on August 3 during debate over a constitutional amendment that would let the legislature redraw the state’s only Republican-held congressional district, the one that covers the Shore. He would call the new state Mardelva, in the hope that the Delaware and Virginia parts of the peninsula would join. The House rejected the amendment on a voice vote.

The hosts fault what came after. Hutchinson later told the Baltimore Sun the amendment was symbolic, and the Minstrel argues that he had used a credible threat to put House Democrats on the defensive and then threw the advantage away: “the bluff worked and he didn’t even realize it.” Wall reads the careful replies from Democrats as a sign that anger on the Shore runs higher than Annapolis admits. He says Hutchinson has earned a primary challenger who backs separation, though both hosts would leave him room to win voters back with a public apology. Showing his own map of the proposed state, Wall calls it “a pretty coherent state” and predicts that Maryland will not keep its present borders for long, with Western Maryland counties also looking to join West Virginia.

Also in this episode

• Earlier attempts to pull the Shore away from Maryland, including one in the late 1990s, and the crab flag Hutchinson displayed on the House floor
• Delaware’s separation from Pennsylvania in 1776, still marked as Separation Day, and the Minstrel’s point that Delaware acted without waiting for every sign
• Raising self-sufficiency with legislators who balk at separation, from the Minstrel’s Greater Idaho contacts to Wall’s case for building up the Shore’s fishing economy and turning down federal crop insurance
• Wall’s advice that Shore residents organize now and seek help from Greater Idaho and the downstate Illinois movement

Secession Speakeasy is an independent program produced by Grant M. Dahl. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect those of the Texian Partisan, Texas Nationalist Enterprises, or the Texas Nationalist Movement. Featuring an episode is not an endorsement.