Daily Archives: October 24, 2024

It’s Looking Like Vermont Will Set a New Turnout Record

2 Replies

Vermonters are responding in large numbers to the opportunity to cast their votes before Election Day via universal mail-in balloting. According to the Secretary of State’s office, town and city clerks have received, and accepted for processing, a total of 125,904 ballots as of the latest count, issued this (Thursday) morning. (Another 18,088 ballots have been returned by voters but not yet officially accepted. It’s a thing.)

Which means, for one, that candidates spending money between now and Election Day are already too late to influence approximately one-third of the electorate. Something to bear in mind for future campaigns. Universal mailed ballots are here to stay, and more and more people will get familiar with the slightly discomfiting process. (Okay, the ballot goes in this envelope, which then gets stuffed in this other envelope, and then I sign that envelope, and somehow the whole process identifies me as the voter but not who I voted for. I think.)

But the main point for my purposes is that one hell of a lot of Vermonters have already participated, and all signs point to a record high vote total. Indeed, the old record might be completely obliterated.

The current standard of 370,968 was set in 2020, which featured a high-stakes presidential election and the debut of universal mail-in balloting — one of the few nice things we got out of the pandemic. Well, we are already one-third of the way to matching that turnout record.

Continue reading →

Signs of the Apocalypse In Your Mailbox

1 Reply

This vaguely mobsterish-lookin’ guy is Joe Luneau, St. Albans auto dealer and Republican candidate for House in the Franklin-3 district currently repped by Democrat Mike McCarthy. This is the photo he chose to plaster on at least two of the many mailers he’s sent to district voters. Seems like there might have been better choices in his collection, but then some people just don’t photograph well. (See also: Kenney, Ted.)

Someone in Franklin-3 shared scans of the Luneau oeuvre with me, and if the Republicans fail to make significant gains in the Legislature this November, the mindset that produced this stuff will be partly to blame. Luneau’s pitch is that Vermont is a hellscape featuring out-of-control drugs and crime, Soviet-level taxation, and prices so high that everyone’s running for the border. (Narrator: No, they’re not.)

(Not mentioned, at all, is the one thing that could make Vermont an unlivable hellscape, and already has for many: climate change-related natural disasters. Recall that Vermont finished near the top among the 50 states in federally-declared disasters between 2011 and 2023.)

Here’s the problem. The message surely resonates with the Republican base, but does it help reach voters across the divide? Because it’ll have to; Luneau ran against McCarthy in 2022 and lost by 15 percentage points. The same challenge faces Republicans across the state — the need to convince lots of people who voted Democratic in the past — and they seem to be approaching it in the same ham-fisted way as Luneau.

I feel safe in saying that because Luneau had his postcards designed, printed and mailed by NH-based Spectrum Marketing, which has done the same work for dozens of Republican legislative candidates around the state. It’s safe to conclude that Luneau’s bumpf is representative of the effort as a whole.

Continue reading →