Monthly Archives: October 2024

The Groundhog Day of Our Disgrace

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One month later, nothing much has changed. Except that the humanitarian crisis then foreseen by advocates for the homeless has become a reality that ought to scar our consciences and lay to rest any claim we have to moral superiority, to the comfortable myth of Vermont as a better, more caring place.

It was on September 15 that a group of advocates gathered in the Statehouse to sound the alarm about the completely predictable unsheltering of close to 2,000 vulnerable Vermonters due to new limits on the GA emergency housing program. They gathered again on October 15 to sound the alarm yet again, as the unsheltering has proceeded apace and state leaders have refused to lift a finger to stop it.

“We are working frantically to keep people from dying,” said Julie Bond of Good Samaritan haven (pictured above, with former Brattleboro town manager Peter Elwell and Frank Knaack of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont looking on). “The situation is impossible, it is immoral, and it is untenable.”

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The Barons Take On a Junior Partner

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It must be nice to have so much money that you can afford to crank out thousand-dollar checks by the bushel and hardly notice it.

Safe to say the Barons of Burlington are in this category, because they continue to broaden their roster of Republican state Senate candidates, each new one seemingly less likely than the last. The newest tchotchke in their collection: Larry Hart, Sr. — or alternatively Larry Wayne Hart — this year’s challenger to Orange County’s nearly perpetual incumbent Democrat Mark MacDonald.

Mr. Hart has previously featured in this space as a mystery candidate who had failed to submit any campaign finance reports. At first I took this to mean that he wasn’t doing anything and hadn’t even bothered to submit a No Activity Report. I heard later that he’d boasted of having $30,000 in the bank. Well, now we know, and the truth is just about exactly in the midpoint of those two speculations. And the bulk of his money came from, you guessed it, the Barons of Burlington. Some of ’em, anyway.

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The Donkey in the Room

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The coverage of this year’s Vermont elections — including, often, my own — generally ignores one factor that will outweigh any of the issues or trends we explore ad nauseam. This includes (1) the much-anticipated tax revolt, which may or may not be a reality, (2) the Barons of Burlington’s plot to kill the state Senate supermajority, and (3) the Democrats’ failure to mount a serious challenge to Gov. Phil Scott. Or anything else you could name.

I refer to the national election. The race for president and the battle for Congressional majorities. This cannot be ignored in any assessment of Vermont’s elections.

There is always a substantial jump in turnout between a midterm election and the ensuing presidential. Since 1994, the smallest jump was between 1994 and 1996, with a 16.7% increase. The biggest was between 2012 and 2014, with a 38.8% increase. The average midterm:presidential increase in that period was 24.1%.

Not all cycles are created equal. 2012:2014 was an outlier on each end, with high turnout for Barack Obama’s re-election followed by 2014’s plunge due to a lackluster gubernatorial contest between mortally wounded incumbent Peter Shumlin and dismally bland challenger Scott Milne.

(Brief digression. The 2014 election was the outlier of all outliers, as Shumlin suffered a catastrophic drop in support.. He’d won 170,749 votes in 2012 — and only 89,509 in 2014. Milne, who very nearly beat Shumlin, actually drew 24,000 FEWER votes in 2014 than losing Republican Randy Brock had in 2012.)

But while not all cycles are created equal, there’s a clear and obvious pattern. A lot more Vermonters go to the polls when the presidency is at stake than when it’s not.

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Kiss of the Five-and-Dime Woman

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You’ve got to give Lenore Broughton credit for persistence. Or maybe slam her for testing that old saying about the definition of insanity. Because she is, in #vtpoli-land, the living embodiment of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Broughton is Vermont’s leading ultraconservative donor. She’s spent $32,620 this year on Vermont political organizations and politicians, and the vast majority are losing causes. (She’s also dropped more than $50,000 so far on the federal level, none of which has gone to Vermont Congressional hopefuls Gerald Malloy or Mark Coester.)

She’s been backing the wrong horses for so long that one might wonder if a candidate might, upon receiving a missive from her, scrawl “Return to Sender” on the envelope and drop it in the nearest mailbox. Problem is, most of ’em can’t afford to. Unlike the candidates backed by the Barons of Burlington, most of the people Broughton supports don’t have any cash to spare.

For those unfamiliar, Broughton is the famously reclusive Burlington resident with a strong aversion to being photographed. (A Seven Days piece from 2012 about a successful attempt to take her picture no longer includes the image, perhaps because the photographer later expressed regret over the whole thing. VTDigger snapped a photo of her at a public meeting, but she was holding a piece of paper over her face.)

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Jim Douglas Manfully Bears the White Man’s Burden

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I came onto the scene a bit too late to get the full Jim Douglas Experience. Moved to Vermont in 2006 (which, yes, still a flatlander, I know, should I really be allowed to vote?) and didn’t pay much attention to #vtpoli until the 2010 campaign, when Dead-Eyed Jim was on his way out the door and into a fairly inert retirement. I have to admit, I see photos of this guy with his characteristically vacant non-smile, and I just don’t get the appeal. Like, this picture on the cover of his terrible memoir (see below), presumably chosen or approved by the subject, makes him look like he’s contemplating a bit of cannibalism.

But I will say this. If Douglas wanted to find a cause celebre to occupy his Golden Years, it’d be tough to find anything more apropros than defending the good name of a long-dead governor from the merry days of Kipling-style white supremacy. If any modern-day figure seems made to carry the threadbare mantle of those unenlightened times, it’s Jim Douglas. And here he is, spending years and clogging up the courts in his defense of former governor John Mead, whose most infamous contribution to our civic life was his enthusiastic advocacy for eugenics.

Douglas took one for the team last week when a judge issued a decidedly unfriendly ruling in his lawsuit over Middlebury College’s decision to take Mead’s name off the college chapel, the most prominent building on campus. It’s one of those rare stories in our perilous times that made me chuckle over my corn flakes.

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The Barons of Burlington Are Trying to Buy the State Senate

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Pictured above is a curious sort of politician: He presents himself as a simple farmer, a rural populist who gives voice to the voiceless — meaning people who live outside the Burlington area. But John Rodgers, former Democratic state lawmaker turned Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, has seen his campaign picked up off the mat by major backing from Chittenden County elites. The Barons of Burlington, you might say.

These same people are writing batches of four-figure checks to a handful of Republican candidates for state Senate who have some chance of winning. The goal, clearly, is to kill the Democratic/Progressive supermajority in the Senate and end the truly historic string of veto overrides in the current biennium. It’s a longshot; the Republicans would need a net gain of four seats to end the supermajority. But if Rodgers wins, they’d only need three because the potential tie-breaking vote would be in their back pocket.*

*Correction: THe tie-breaking vote might be useful but not for veto overrides. If there’s a tie on an override, it’s already lost.

A few months ago, this Barons of Burlington thing was kind of cute. Like, can you really expect to swing an election with a sprinkling of large donations? Now, it’s looking like a serious, coordinated effort beyond anything I’ve seen in my 12+ years of walking this beat. I mean, all these people writing identical checks to the same handful of candidates? It’s beyond anyone’s notion of coincidence.

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Don’t Change Bulls in the Middle of a Run

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Well, it’s time for an update on Andrea Murray’s finances.

The far-right-posing-as-a-moderate candidate for state Senate in Windsor County has finally caught up on her homework. She filed her October 1 campaign finance report and her September 1 report at the same time — on September 30. As Maxwell Smart would say, “Missed it by that much!”

The new numbers show more of the same: Spending a lot of her own money, raising very little outside her own household, and paying big money to an out-of-state political consultancy. But this time it’s a different consultancy.

That’s right, shortly before the primary, she apparently dropped the Las Vegas-based McShane LLC and started paying Illinois-based Cor Strategies. She also brought on board, as a paid consultant, a failed far-right candidate for local office. Good times.

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Going Down All the Rabbit Holes With a Republican Candidate for State Senate

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Joe Gervais has returned to the political stage. The extremely unsuccessful 2022 Republican candidate for a House seat in and around Manchester is now running for state Senate in Bennington County. Two years ago in this space, I covered the extreme views ineptly concealed behind a façade of common sense conservatism, such as election denialism, Covid conspiratorialism, and belief in the thoroughly debunked canard that vaccines cause autism.

But that was a mere appetizer for the main course we have on today’s menu. Gervais is once again running as a fiscally conservative Republican of the kind that would make Phil Scott proud… but he made the cardinal mistake of revealing his true self in a blog on Substack called “Vermont Musings.”

And boy, are his views ever extreme. Among the most extreme I’ve seen in Vermont politics, and that includes the likes of Art Peterson, Gregory Thayer, and John Klar.

Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

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Meandering Toward Re-Election

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The latest round of campaign finance reports tells the same old story: Gov. Phil Scott is meandering to re-election, while Democratic challenger Esther Charlestin is on a road to nowhere.

This post will focus on the governor, who is squandering an opportunity to put his stamp on Vermont politics. As is his wont. But first, a moment on Charlestin. She did manage to raise more money than she spent in September, so her campaign actually has two nickels to rub together. But not much more than that.

Charlestin raised $12,921 last month, which was decent by her standards but pitifully small in terms of fueling a competitive effort. Her fundraising total for the entire campaign is a ridiculous $34,522. Recall that Howard Dean set $2 million as the required bankroll for a serious run at Scott, and realize that with a month left before Election Day, Charlestin is 1.7% of the way there. Yikes.

Context: As of October 1, 2022, the famously resource-strapped Brenda Siegel had raised $149,193 — more than four times as much as Charlestin. Double yikes.

Charlestin’s campaign spent $8,626 in September, bringing total expenditures to $30,935, so she enters October with a robust balance of $3,587. Triple yikes with whipped cream and sprinkles on top.

But enough about that. Let’s turn to what Phil Scott is doing. Or, more to the point, what he could and should be doing.

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Where Is Our Bureaucratic Superhero of Yesteryear?

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Man, we could really use some Pat Leahy right about now.

Not that I have any beef with his decision to retire. It was the right thing to do. But Leahy was our D.C. wizard, our bureaucratic Batman, and now that he’s gone we seem to be struggling with, whaddya know, wielding influence on the federal level.

Leahy wasn’t the most progressive of figures. But his decades of seniority and his insider expertise meant that Vermont punched above its weight on governmental matters, especially when it came to money. I wouldn’t say we’ve got no clout in the post-Pat era, but we’ve got a lot less than we did when he was watching over Gotham.

Before the 2022 election, we had the president pro tem of the freakin’ Senate, plus a key leader of the House Democratic Caucus in Peter Welch. At a time when we were losing Leahy’s pull, Welch’s decision to run for Senate dealt us a double blow.

Now, Welch is a politician with a politician’s ego. It would have been awfully tough for him to turn down a career-capping promotion to the Senate and an exit from the barely controlled madness of the House. But he didn’t do Vermont any favors when he did so. At age 77, he won’t get the chance to reach the upper rungs of the senatorial ladder. And Bernie’s next term will almost certainly be his last, assuming he disposes of Scary Eagle Man in November. We’re gonna be charity cases in the Senate for years to come, and Becca Balint has just begun her ascent in the House. Plus, she’ll almost certainly run for the Senate at the first incumbent-free opportunity, putting us back at the bottom in the House.

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