House District 33 Primary Conversations: Matt Bucher

Spotlight Delaware · Maggie Reynolds · September 7, 2026

Spotlight Delaware reporter Maggie Reynolds recently spoke with Matt Bucher, who is seeking the Republican nomination for House District 33 in Delaware in the Sept. 15, 2026, primary election. His opponent, Morgan Hudson, declined to be interviewed.

The seat is held by Republican incumbent Charles Postles, who is retiring after a decade of service in the House of Representatives.

Bucher is a former Milford school board member and Republican Party district chair, while Hudson is involved with her family’s construction cleaning business. She is also board president of the Frederica Senior Center.

Readers can find condensed versions of the candidates’ answers below, while the accompanying podcasts feature unedited excerpts from our conversations.

Matt Bucher

Can you give me some background information about yourself and what led you to join the race? So I am a commercial estimator for a large scale institutional floor covering company. We do hospitals, government buildings, schools, churches, retail stores, car dealerships, that type of thing.

I’m in charge of bidding the jobs, and they can be hundreds or even millions of dollars worth of contracts. So I’m in charge of really profit and loss, trying to make a job work for the most competitive price.

Twenty years ago, I also started volunteering in the Milford School District. My son went through the Milford School District. He is a senior at Dartmouth College now.

So I agreed to do that, and I ran a very serious campaign. I was already involved in Republican politics by then and was chair of the 33rd District Republican Committee, which I had for three and a half terms. I worked very closely with Charles Postles, who is the 33rd District representative who is retiring.

But as far as the school board goes, it was very interesting. I wasn’t particularly well-known or popular, but I led with my values and ran a conventional campaign. I took it very seriously and got a lot of support and won overwhelmingly.

So during my tenure on the school board, Milford is in a very, very good position, and it was financially all along, but we’ve been able to cut tax rates repeatedly for the last four or five years and at the same time our reserves are higher than they’ve ever been.

I think it’s very unlikely in the near future, even the far future barring a series of disasters, that Milford will need to go out for an operating referendum the way you see other neighboring school districts struggle with sometimes. Capital budgets and capital construction is different.

I also had found out that Milford, unlike many of our neighboring districts, did not have an educational foundation, or an academic charitable foundation.

So I decided, well, if it’s gonna get done, I’m gonna have to do it. So I got with the IRS and a corporate agent, and over a few month period, I founded and financed the startup of the Buccaneer Educational Foundation, a charitable educational academic foundation that provides classroom-sized grants for teachers that want a unique educational experience or some type of field trip with an academic basis.

So it’s been a great success. I think of my tenure on the school board, something that I didn’t even have to be on the school board to do is the thing I’m really most proud of and I will be in that as long as I’m alive.

Why did you decide to run for 33rd District State Representative? So as I mentioned earlier, from 2019 to 2025, I was the chairman of the Republican Party for the 33rd District. What’s interesting about the 33rd District is it is the closest in terms of party registration between Republicans and Democrats of any of the 41 districts in the state.

When I first got in there, out of 20,000 registered voters in the district, plus or minus, there were 98 more Ds than Rs.

So we held registration drives. We had volunteers give out literature in the community. We invited people to the meetings. We upped our presence at events. And we slowly but surely turned a major Democrat advantage into a Republican advantage.

And today, it hovers around 340 to 370 more Rs than Ds in the 33rd. It’s the very definition of a swing district in terms of registration.

And eventually the House minority leadership asked me to run for the House seat, and I said, “Absolutely.”

Has Representative Postles formally endorsed you or it was more a discussion about you running? He has not and he will not endorse anyone.

I had a conversation with him a long time ago, and he said when he ran, he was too in a primary situation and he ran his campaign. And he felt that the strongest candidate will win out. The one that works the hardest, the one that has the most presence, the one who is most suited for this district would win organically.

I certainly respect that.

You’ve talked a lot about your background with the Milford School Board and an educational focus in some legislation you have advocated for in the past. Do you see that being your primary legislative focus if elected? Definitely one of them. I would say that if I had to distill down my overriding philosophy in all phases of Delaware’s societal fabric — education, infrastructure, business, taxes, healthcare, any of those things — it’s local authority and local control.

I’m sure you’ve heard coming from some quarters that Delaware has, despite the results that we have, one of the per capita highest spending per child, which is true. But a lot of that comes from legislative and executive mandates over the years. There’s no flexibility in funding.

There’s no flexibility in what a district can spend money on. Less than 1% is truly discretionary spending. So a lot of times we are spending on things that we don’t really need or don’t really need in the quantity that we’ve got them.

Every time a mandate is enacted via legislation, you need somebody to comply with it.

You have administration in some of these industries doing nothing but complying with government regulations. I think that if a mandate via legislation or a fiat from one of the alphabet agencies is important enough to make law, then it ought to be important enough to fund the compliance with it as well.

And if it’s not, why then are we doing the legislation?

Continuing on the topics of education and school funding, do you have thoughts on the Public Education Funding Commission formula? Generally I’m for it because we need to try something new. I would’ve preferred it to be more streamlined, but I understand the constraints that the committees were under, and I know many of the individuals on the committees, and they actually did a fabulous job.

Change comes hard, especially change of the kind of consequential nature we’re talking about.

I am cautiously optimistic about the introduction of that framework, and I hope for our kids’ sake and our local schools’ sake that it helps some of the districts where we’ve got children that need extra support.

So public schools must take everybody. If a child presents themself at the schoolhouse door, we are to educate. And that is as it should be.

I’ve always been a fan of not only public schools, but private schools, parochial schools, religious schools, home schools, and charter schools, which are, of course, public schools.

We need all of the above. We need all the experimentation we can get. Public schools are in a unique situation that they must take everybody, and they do take the more challenging student.

But you have kids that need extra supports. You have kids that have IEPs or 504s, that have issues that we are legally and morally bound as a society to mitigate any way we can. Better to do it now than have to do it later.

I believe that, in general, conservatives should not turn away from public education and should in fact turn toward them. That’s one reason I ran for school board, to bring our perspective into the public schools, as far as monetary issues, traditional curriculum, that type of thing.

Outside of education, what would you identify as the most pressing issues to the 33rd District? I work with individuals in organizations like the Delaware Volunteer Firefighters Association, and their legislative priorities would be mine. Even simple things like the equipment stipend is years out of date. It’s like $7,500 or so, and a piece of equipment that they might need would be $25,000.

There needs to be more money for training for our volunteer firefighters. I would like to work someday toward dedicated funding for our local fire companies. I think it’s an interesting system where firefighters and their lobbying associations have to beg each year to the legislature for the things that everybody knows they need.

And are there any other priorities you’d point to as the most pressing issues to the district? So I’m knocking on doors. And I’ve been doing that for like two and a half months now. And the No. 1 issue, believe it or not, is speeding. So we don’t have enough traffic enforcement on some of these secondary roads.

We don’t have things like bus turnarounds in developments. Speed cameras or the sensors, that type of thing. We’ve got to get control of the traffic situation.

And they’re concerned about growth.

That’s largely a county thing. But I’ll be working closely with the county. I have a relationship with the local county commissioners and will support whatever route they go as far as enforcing the growth zone, that type of thing.

Are you in favor of more growth in your district? No. I know what’s coming. Eastern Sussex is already there. The Smyrna-Middletown area is already there. They are coming. We have to make sure we, being the county working with the legislature, working with our municipalities that we insist on the infrastructure before the development.

That’s the big trap that Eastern Sussex has fallen into. We don’t want that to happen to Southern Kent.

And I don’t know what the solution is to that. There are some things that they’re working on. But we have to be responsive on a local level. Remember, a state representative is not a leader. He is a servant. And I’m running to serve the people for a time, and then it’ll be somebody else.

There’s a pretty sizable farming population in the 33rd. Do you have a background in agriculture? And what would your approach be to representing farming interests in your district in Dover? Peripherally. I’ve been involved in farming, but I’ve never been a farmer.

So I am a member of the Farm Bureau, and I’ve been a volunteer for several years for the Delaware Agricultural Museum, which endeavors to protect our agricultural heritage. And I do work with farmers on and talk to them about legislative issues. I have good friends that are in the leadership at the Farm Bureau.

I think the basic thing that I would say this for every sector is you have to listen to their concerns, and their concerns are private property rights. Their concerns are assessments. Their concerns are prices. Their concerns are taxes.

And I will continue to be an advocate for helping them with any individual concerns they’ve got.

You’ve mentioned that the 33rd district has a close margin of Democratic and Republican voters. What is your campaign approach given that it’s a pretty close district? Well, so fortunately, which has borne itself out in the numbers over the past few elections, the independent or unaffiliated vote pretty strongly is basically conservative. Not in all things, but in most things.

This district has a rural character. I mean, there’s a few communities, but outside of Milford, I’d say the communities like Magnolia and Frederica and Bowers are rural, small-town communities. They have very, very conservative values on a macro-sense.

And you’ll see it on my literature. It says, “This is a very pro-God, pro-family, and pro-constitution area,” and I hope it always remains so. I want to preserve our rural character, stand up for the values that the members of the 33rd believe, and make sure that we have a vibrant community that is desirable for their children and grandchildren to live in and stay here.

Morgan Hudson

Morgan Hudson is another Republican candidate seeking office in the 33rd district. Hudson told Spotlight Delaware she would not be able to make time for an interview before the primary election due to obligations caring for her newborn baby and other relatives.

According to her campaign website, Hudson was born and raised in the Milford area and works as a part of her family’s construction cleaning business.

Her website also states that she has managed rental properties for the past 15 years and is currently serving on the Kent County Board of Adjustments. Hudson has run for office twice in the past. In 2016 she ran for the same state representative seat she is currently seeking and was defeated by Charles Postles, who has served as the district’s representative until his retirement this fall. She also unsuccessfully sought a seat on the Kent County Levy Court in 2022.

Hudson’s website lists her campaign priorities as including directing resources to small businesses, preserving family farms, supporting public safety and first responders, and cutting the wait time for access to healthcare providers.

Hudson is also president of the board of the Frederica Senior Center. She often speaks about wanting to support the senior citizen community in her district and promotes the initiatives at the senior center on her Facebook page. In an email to Spotlight Delaware when she first filed for office in December 2025, Hudson wrote that she is running to “protect our family farms, small businesses, and the next generation.”

She also wrote, “When we lift up small businesses and farms, our local economy grows, jobs stay here, and our district remains the place we’re proud to call home.”

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