Latest from the developing 2024 campaign in Burlington: Not one, but two Progressive city councilors will not seek re-election. The departures of Zoraya Hightower and Joe Magee will leave only two incumbent Progressives: Gene Bergman, elected in 2022*, and Melo Grant, elected last March.

Yep, the most tenured Progressive councilor will have been in office for only two years.

Not that they’ll lose a whole lot of seniority. Hightower is currently the senior Prog, and she’s only been in office since 2020. And that’s the thing: the Vermont Progressive Party has a severe retention issue — not only in Burlington, but in the Statehouse as well. The result is a party spinning its wheels and having to work very hard just to not lose any ground.

*Note: Bergman may have been elected fairly recently, but he’s been around Burlington politics for a long time and, in fact, served on what was then the Board of Aldermen in the late 80s to early 90s.

If you go back to the winter of 2021, less than three years ago, it looked like the Progs were on the brink of taking over Burlington. Here’s how Seven Days put it in a February 2021 profile of councilor and mayoral candidate Max Tracy.

Since 2019, Progressives have booted four moderates from the city council, shifting the balance of the governing body further and further left.

The results of the 2021 election gave Progressives hope for a continued rise. Tracy came within an eyelash of ousting incumbent Democrat Miro Weinberger, and would likely have won the race if not for the mayoral candidacy of independent Councilor Ali Dieng — or if Burlington had employed a ranked choice voting system at the time. The Progs also elected two new councilors, Jack Hanson and Perri Freeman, who were both seen as having potential for bright futures.

The decline of the Progs since then has largely been tied to their advocacy of policing reform, including a shift in police funding to alternative support services. There’s truth in that, to be sure. But I think the sheer turnover in Progressive officeholders has played a big part as well. There’s no familiarity. There’s no confidence that a Progressive councilor will even manage to serve a full term, let alone build a track record and the kind of relationships that can propel a politician forward into the Statehouse or perhaps even statewide office.

Tracy, who’d been on city council since 2012, left office after losing his race for mayor. Hanson resigned in the middle of his second term. Freeman bowed out after serving two terms. Hightower, that most senior of Progressive councilors, didn’t want to run for re-election in 2022. According to Seven Days, she only ran “after failing to find someone else to run for her Ward 1 seat.” She’s taking no chances this time.

Since the salad days of early 2021, the Progs have also lost councilors Jane Stromberg (served one term, 2020-22) and Ali House (elected March 2022, resigned that October).

Things are almost as bleak in the Statehouse, where the Progs have struggled to maintain their small numbers amid departure after departure. The most senior lawmaker who lists “Progressive” as their first affiliation is Brian Cina, first elected in 2018. Since then, the House Prog caucus has had three leaders: Robin Chesnut-Tangerman, who lost his bid for re-election in 2020 (and then returned in 2022 as a Democrat), Selene Coburn, who didn’t seek re-election in 2022, and Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, who’s now running for mayor of Burlington. She could keep her House seat if she wins the mayoralty, but I’d expect her to leave the Legislature if she wins in March. Should that happen, the Progs will be looking for yet another leader to emerge from their increasingly callow ranks.

On the other side of the Statehouse, Tanya Vyhovsky is the only senator who lists “Progressive” first. She’s in her first term, after serving only one term in the House.

If you want to include those who identify as Democratic/Progressive, you get two more representatives, Elizabeth Burrows (serving since 2021) and Mary-Katherine Stone (took office this year). That doesn’t help. Two of the three D/P senators add significant seniority — Phil Baruth (elected 2010), Andrew Perchlik (2018) — but are Baruth and Perchlik really seen as Progressive leaders? (D/P Anne Watson is in her first term.)

I understand how hard it is to hold elective office in Vermont, where the hours are long, the expectations heavy, and the compensation insulting. The Progs are short on trust-fund babies, spouses of high earners, and affluent retirees. Those who have left in recent years have had perfectly valid reasons for doing so. But the Progressives already face all the obstacles our system puts in the way of third parties, and the constant turnover in officeholders makes their task all the more difficult.

A few short years ago they had hopes of capturing control of Burlington, which could have provided a launchpad for future legislators, a spotlight for party leaders, and a proving ground for their policies. But they’ve hey lost their council majority. The departures of Hightower and Magee make it tougher to hold onto the ground they have, let alone return to some measure of power. Every officeholder’s departure is just one more brick in the wall.