The Vermont Republican Party has a long record of losing statewide races except when the name “Phil Scott” is on the ballot. Scott is still undefeated for the entirety of his political career going all the way back to 2000, when he rode the anti-civil union wave* into the state Senate. Otherwise, it’s been solid goose eggs for the VTGOP in statewide contests since the Jim Douglas era, if memory serves.

*Seems unbelievable now, but the Republicans nearly swept Washington County’s three Senate seats that year. The late Bill Doyle** finished first, Scott second, and Republican J. Paul Giuliani almost ousted two-term incumbent Democrat Ann Cummings. But we were all much older then, we’re younger than that now.

**Correction: “The late Bill Doyle” is still with us at age 97. My apologies.

Otherwise, the top of the Republican ticket has featured tons of fringey no-hopers with a sprinkling of old-fashioned conservatives. Lately it’s been more of the former, as the far right has seized control of the VTGOP apparatus. And it’s looking like 2024 will be no exception. Not only do we have the soundly defeated Gerald Malloy making another bid for the U.S. Senate, but the even more soundly defeated Gregory Thayer has staked his claim to another bid for lieutenant governor. (The Vegas wise guys have set the over/under on joint campaign appearances featuring Thayer and Scott at… zero.)

Malloy is one up on Thayer, having actually won a party primary in 2022. (He scored a surprise upset of Christina “Mayonnaise” Nolan, while Thayer was losing badly to then-state senator Joe Benning.) But the man behind the Scary Eagle campaign signs (not to mention toddler-sized nightmare fuel T-shirts) didn’t stand a chance against then-U.S. Rep. Peter Welch in the general, losing by more than 40 percentage points.

Undaunted, Malloy is back at it once again, sprinkling my Twitter feed with inanities and half-baked talking points. In a recent entry, he described Vermont as “naturally perfect,” unleashed a brief rant against “excessive government overreach” (as opposed to “regular old government overreach”) and stuck the landing by saying safe injection sites are “LUDICROUS,” all caps. The quality of Malloy’s insight can be seen in the pinned tweet on his feed:

To be fair, June 13, 2022 was a bad day on the stock market. The Dow lost nearly 900 points, closing at 31,392. The Dow opened today’s trading at, um, 38,392.90.

That’s one hell of a crash, Scary Bird Man.

But enough about Malloy, whose exploits I covered when he announced his second bid for Senate in December. Let’s turn our attention to The Man Who Would Be Lieutenant Governor.

Thayer is a Rutland accountant (which will seem painfully ironic in a moment) and wannabe organizer of ultraconservative movements with embarrassingly small followers. He not only attended the January 6 insurrection, he organized a bus trip that brought several dozen Vermonters to the event. He sponsored a traveling road show of anti-Black Lives Matter and anti-critical race theory propaganda. You can get a good sense of his ideology (climate change is “Hogwash”) and his tenuous grasp on basic spelling and grammar (he claims to have served on “the Rutland City Boar of Aldermen”) from a 2022 candidate questionnaire published by the Vermont Daily Chronicle.

Also in 2022, Thayer flouted Vermont’s campaign finance disclosure law by submitting a tax form on which he obscured the dollar figures with a crudely-wielded Sharpie. His primary opponent Benning pointed this out in a pre-primary debate. Thayer’s explanation? “I was given advice to do it that way, to blacken out.” He refused to disclose who had given that advice.

Thayer was also asked about his non-disclosure disclosure by WCAX’s Calvin Cutler, to whom he responded with “I had received some advice that I could redact and maybe in hindsight that was bad advice.”

Reminder: This guy is a professional accountant.

Cutler asked if he planned to file a 1040 that actually complied with state law. His answer: “We have not made that decision yet. A lot’s been going on, and some stuff over that some things we had heard and things we were trying to figure out.”

Well, as long as you have a plan.

Thayer never did comply with the law. His clumsily redacted 1040 can still be accessed on the Secretary of State’s website.

Fortunately for him, there is no penalty for failing to follow Vermont’s campaign finance laws. Like our laughable ethics rules, they were written by officeholders with no interest whatsoever in facing potential punishment for non-compliance. Assuming he follows through on his promise slash threat to run for LG again this year, we’ll have to be sure to check for Sharpie traces on his 2024 financial disclosure materials.

In his email to potential supporters, Thayer branded his 2022 campaign as an exercise in “staying positive, and never once attacking my opponent” and promised more of the same this year, and then branded incumbent David Zuckerman as having “a documented record of disaster.” He couldn’t even finish his campaign pitch without breaking his own word.

As in his previous effort, Thayer is trying to present himself as a bearer of “common-sense conservative principles” who can “put Vermont back on a solid center-right path.” it’s a futile effort to put his notorious past behind him, and it’ll stop working about the time he next opens his mouth in public.

So, good luck to our governor, who will have to share a ticket with the likes of Malloy and Thayer plus, most likely, a heapin’ helpin’ of H. Brooke Paige and a bunch of extremist candidates for state House and Senate. Besides Phil Scott, that’s all the Vermont Republican Party has to offer.