Barring an extremely unlikely vote in the Legislature, we may have seen the last of David Zuckerman on our political stage. Maybe not; he’s only 53 years old, a full generation younger than the guy we just elevated to the White House (and 30 years younger than our senior U.S. Senator). But if we are seeing the end of the Zuckerman experience, it’ll go down as one of the more curious public careers of our time. He is one of the most loved and hated politicians in Vermont.

Zuckerman was 25 years old when he was first elected to the Legislature in 1997. He’s been in office ever since, except for a two-year hiatus from 2021-23. He won 12 consecutive elections, a streak only broken when he took on the undefeated Phil Scott. You don’t compile a record like Zuckerman’s without smarts and talent, which he has in abundance, but there’s also a bit of tone-deafness about him. The latest indicator of this is his dalliance with Ian Diamondstone’s demand that the Legislature return him to office. He doesn’t seem to get that the longer this goes on, the sourer will be the end of his tenure.

Throughout the Phil Scott era, Zuckerman has been the most successful Democratic* politician this side of the Congressional delegation — and yet, many in the Vermont Democratic Party have ached to be rid of him. He’s the most high profile Progressive figure of his day and he has a formidable donor base, but he just got beat by a guy who didn’t even start campaigning until July. He is seen by many as a champion of progressive causes generally and women’s rights specifically, but others see him as untrustworthy if not a little bit squicky.

*Yes, I know he’s a Prog, but he was on the Democratic ticket. We’ll get to that.

Still, it says here that Zuckerman became a lightning rod for Democrats less because of his character than because of his habit of winning elections.

He established a statewide profile while representing the then-unified Chittenden district in the Senate, which the Democrats considered their territory by birthright. He won his first race for lieutenant governor in 2016 because two Democrats — Shap Smith and Kesha Ram (now Hinsdale) — split the mainstream vote and gave him the nomination with a mere 44.3%. No Dem opposed him in 2018; then in 2020 he ran for governor and got shellacked by Phil Scott. No shame in that; it happens to pretty much everybody who dares to challenge Governor Nice Guy.

His 2022 comeback was 2016 redux; the Democratic primary found him alone in the Prog/prog lane while three mainstream Dems fought it out. The result: Zuckerman won with 43.7%. This year, the Democrats managed to avoid that scenario but their solo challenger was the unknown, untested Thomas Renner, and Zuckerman beat him without much trouble.

But the general election brought a Republican wave that saw each of the Dems’ statewide incumbents lose about 10 percentage points off their 2022 totals, but only Zuckerman was vulnerable to that kind of dropoff. Doug Hoffer, Charity Clark, Sarah Copeland Hanzas and Mike Pieciak each went from the mid-60s in 2022 to the mid-50s this year, while Zuckerman fell from 54% to 44%.

And that’s the simplest explanation for Zuckerman’s defeat. It was a bad year for Democrats; he was already less popular than his peers because of his own foibles or years of Democratic undermining, or both; and so he lost. By a very narrow margin.

Observant readers will have noticed that I haven’t mentioned Tampongate, the story reported by VTDigger a week before Primary Day. That’s because I don’t see it as a major factor in Zuckerman’s defeat. It seems clear that larger forces — the Republican wave and Zuckerman’s baked-in electoral vulnerability — were more impactful than the scandal itself. But it didn’t help, and the timing suggests it was a Democratic effort to take him out in the primary.

If that’s what it was, it didn’t work. And that’s due, in large part, to our diminished media ecosystem. It wasn’t too long ago that a big scoop published in one outlet would be pursued by others, anxious to get their own piece of the story. Each reverberation in the echo chamber would amplify the story. Instead, the Digger article was a one-off. Those kinds of stories rarely make an impact because the vast majority of people just aren’t paying that much attention. Recall that it took months upon months of intense coverage for the Watergate scandal to catch fire.

The story certainly didn’t help Zuckerman’s reputation in political circles, but most voters don’t inhabit political circles. In the end, his supprt fell just as much as Clark and Pieciak and Hoffer and Copeland Hanzas. If he was uniquely hurt by Tampongate, it didn’t show in the results.

Now let’s talk about the real cause of the Democrats’ antipathy toward Zuckerman: His record of winning Democratic nominations. Many Dems see Progressives as usurpers in their primaries, desperately clinging to the VDP’s coattails as their only path to victory, with Zuckerman as the clingiest of the lot. There’s a little problem with this. It’s called history.

Back in the 2000s, the Progressives were running purely on their own. And they were splitting the lefty vote, allowing quite a few Republicans to eke out plurality victories. Take, for example, Brian Dubie’s initial win as LG with only 41% of the vote. Democrat Peter Shumlin and Progressive Anthony Pollina took a combined 57%, but finished second and third respectively.

The Dems got real tired of that and, at least initially, were fine with Progressives running in their primaries instead of on a third party line. But then the Progs started winning Democratic nominations, and the Dems don’t like that any better than they liked the Progs cluttering up general election races. The Dems’ real issue with the Progressive Party is that it dares to exist.

The solution for this is ranked choice voting. We may get to that eventually, someday, but many Democratic lawmakers oppose RCV because they fear it might give the Progs a few more wins, and they can’t stand the idea.

Anyway. I’ve gone a fair distance away from Zuckerman, but he’s been a central figure in our politics for a long time and his footprints are everywhere. As I said at the top, he’s still pretty young and could still have a — I was going to say second act in politics, but I guess it’d be a third.

It may seem unlikely right now, but if you want a counter-example, look no farther than the man who just beat him. What would you have given for John Rodgers’ political prospects six months ago? At the time, he was a former Democratic senator who’d alienated his colleagues and lost his Senate seat after missing the deadline for filing candidacy petitions. Now he’s a heartbeat away from the corner office and he’ll be the odds-on favorite for the Republican gubernatorial nomination whenever Scott steps aside.

Here’s a redemption scenario for Zuckerman that’s far more plausible than Rodgers’ excellent adventure. Let’s say Bernie Sanders retires at the end of his new term, U.S. Rep. Becca Balint runs to replace him, and multiple hopefuls run for her seat including the not-yet-60-year-old Zuckerman. You’d have a Congressional primary with the same dynamic as his last two LG wins: he competes against multiple mainstream Democrats, wins the nomination with a plurality, and handily defeats a Republican punching bag in the general election. Hey presto: Congressman David Zuckerman.

I’m not predicting that any of this will happen. Political projections are for entertainment purposes only, and for all I know Zuckerman might be content to live out his days as a farmer and Progressive éminence grise. But never underestimate a politician’s hunger for elective office. Time is still on his side, and he remains an appealing figure to many. Don’t count him out.