“I’m going to be following through with my campaign message, working on the issues we identified from the beginning. The No. 1 concern is the budgeting process – getting the state of Delaware’s costs in line. I’m also working toward creating a climate for businesses and jobs in Delaware. The third issue centers around concerns of overdevelopment. That was the message set consistently during the campaign,” she said.

Briggs King also said she’s going to continue with Round the Table with Ruth - informal, open-door-styled sessions with the public, modeled after Cup of Joe with Joe discussions held by former Republican Rep. Joe Booth, whose seat Briggs King now holds.

Briggs King followed Booth to the lower chamber, keeping the Georgetown-Lewes area in GOP hands. Republicans remain a minority, with 24 Democrats and 17 Republicans in the House.

In August, Booth was elected to the 19th Senatorial District seat in another special election for the seat of deceased Senate President Pro Tempore Adams. On election night, Briggs King was closely eyeing the results on a projected screen as the district totals came into Georgetown’s Sussex County Association of Realtors. She was surrounded by Rep. Gary Simpson, R-Milford, Rep. Greg Lavelle, R-Sharpley, Republican Party State Committee Chairman Tom Ross and Ron Sams, chairman of the Sussex County Region.

Briggs King’s campaign manager and brother, Lewis Briggs, gave the newly elected representative a quick kiss and hug after results were tallied.

“It was a lot of pressure. We really worked hard getting her recognition out there, which was a major factor. We had a lot of blue shirts. We had three or four talking points that we started with and we stayed with this,” said Lewis Briggs. He said his campaign’s attack on Democrats, who would have secured a supermajority if Robinson won, worked to Briggs King’s favor. “The whole three-fifths issue resonated with a lot of people. But, we wanted to maintain an above-board campaign.”

Only 33 percent of registered voters turned out to the polls with 4,534 votes cast out of 13,870 registered voters, including 331 absentee ballots. Briggs King won in six of the eight election districts. Robinson won the downtown Lewes area by 166 votes, but he only won by 20 votes in unincorporated Lewes’ Edgewater Estates area.

Millsboro Republican Shaun Fink, chairman of the Republicans’ 41st Election District, said mudslinging quickly took over during the brief campaign. “With Ruth winning, I think it’s indicative of the mood of the voting population. I think it bodes well for 2010. The Democrats employed their usual character-assassination tactics. People didn’t buy it because they realize there’s something bigger happening,” said Fink.

Briggs King came under fire for being a registered lobbyist. Her campaign literature indicated a Robinson win would create a supermajority of Democrats in the House, who, she said, would immediately raise taxes – without needing Republican votes – a charge Robinson denied. Inaccurate, however, was a notion in her campaign literature that stated the Democrats could change the state constitution, too, with a victorious Robinson.

For his part, Robinson mailed literature to voters depicting Briggs King as a fox guarding a henhouse, calling her a special-interest lobbyist.

“They tried to paint her in a dark light. The only place it worked was in-town Lewes,” said Fink. “The only place that this election was even close was in the second election district: Edgewater. That was a dead heat. In the first district, in-town Lewes, Rob won only by about 150 votes. What motivated those people was the Lingo-Townsend debate. From the start, she said she was against it,” said Fink.

Local Democrats gathered at the law office of Georgetown’s Fuqua & Yori on election night, working the phones in the 11th hour to get voters to the polls. Once the results were in, Democrats have had little to say. Calls to Democratic leaders and to Robinson were not returned at press time.