The House and Senate Democratic caucuses took six of the best in this year’s election, losing their supermajorities and being reduced to, well, plain ol’ majorities. (As old Statehouse hands have noted, their “defeat” reduced them to the kind of solid partisan edge that used to be normal.) Most of the losses came in rural precincts, and the remaining rural Dems are in their feelings about it. As Rep. John O’Brien of Tunbridge put it, “we had nothing to run on.”
Given the situation, caucus leadership had two choices: Rein in their ambitious agenda or stay the course and try to craft better messaging. Recent votes for leadership positions show the majority supports option number two. Rather than try to accommodate rural discontent, House and Senate caucuses each decided to make their leadership teams more strongly Chittenden-centric. (Hat tip to Rising Young Blogger Matthew Vigneau for calling the House changes a couple weeks in advance.)
House leadership also seems determined to ignore independent Rep. Laura Sibilia’s bid for Speaker, as they went ahead with renominating Speaker Jill Krowinski while voting to prohibit non-Democrats from seeking the caucus nomination. The issue will be settled in the full House come January.
Clearly, the hatches are being battened. While it might seem as though the Dems are ignoring the lessons to be learned from their November beatdown, their actions make a lot of sense in two ways: The True Believer and the Machiavellian.
First, and most direct: How about we assume the Democrats are sincere about their agenda? Like, maybe they actually believe their policies will make Vermont a better place to live and work, and they take pride in what they’ve accomplished despite gubernatorial opposition.
If so, then why would they deep-six their platform at the first sign of trouble?
And that’s what the election was. It was huge and decisive and unexpected, but it was the first time the Dems had encountered serious headwinds since at least 2014. Over the last decade, aside from their failure to beat Phil Scott, they’ve been running the electoral roost. (Which doubtless made them a little fat, happy and clueless. That’s what happens to a party that enjoys an unbroken string of successes.)
Indeed, O’Brien’s “nothing to run on” comment must have rankled more than a few caucus members who’d worked hard to pass major legislation and enact it through an historic series of veto overrides. The child care package is “nothing”? Multiple big climate bills are “nothing”? Housing reform is “nothing”? I mean, sure, the Bottle Bill bit the dust, but still, that’s a hell of a lot of nothing.
The majority caucuses must feel some justifiable pride in their record. Their one failure was addressing the school funding mess that resulted in double-digit property tax hikes for many a Vermonter, and that was the thing that tipped the scales in the end. But otherwise, there’s a lot to be proud of.
And now we turn to the Machiavellian dimension. The ranks of rural Democrats have been dramatically thinned — in my view, partly due to anti-tax sentiment and also due to the reddening trend in rural America writ large. Rural areas are becoming more conservative. You see that most clearly in the Caledonia and Orleans Senate races. Longtime moderate Democrats Jane Kitchel and Bobby Starr retired, and the first elections without their names on the ballot weren’t even close. The Dems fielded credible candidates in both races, but they lost by 16 and 17 percentage points respectively.
It’d be hard not to conclude that those districts, and others like them, were only in the Dems’ column because of familiarity and name recognition. They seem to be Republican territory now. So maybe the remaining Democrats are doing a bit of triage. We may see them concentrating their forces in areas where they still have an edge. Which is enough for solid majorities, if not veto-proof ones.
I don’t know if leadership is really that cold-blooded, but it’s certainly not unthinkable. Hey, if you’re going to lose most of those rural seats and you still have comfortable majorities, then why dilute the agenda that makes you popular with your base in the possibly vain hope of winning back the Kingdom?
Still, it would have been politic to create leadership teams that were more geographically diverse. But leadership decided not to do that, for reasons that make sense when you think about it.
The Vermont Political Observer. 
“You see that most clearly in the Caledonia and Orange Senate races.” should say “…Caledonia and Orleans races.”
Thank you! Irene WrennerSenator, Chittenden North (Milton, Fairfax, Westford, Essex)Cell: 802 338 2247 Clerk, Senate Agriculture and Institutions Committees
Rural CaucusSportsmen’s CaucusNational Guard Caucus
Joint Legislative Justice Oversight CommitteeJoint Information Technology Oversight Committee Ag Worker Labor & Employment Laws Study Committee
“Multiple big climate bills are “nothing”?” That is correct and every VT politician that thinks that Vermont going green will do anything to benefit the climate shows me that they clearly don’t understand economies of scale. This legislature is like a kid who wants to go out for ice cream when there is a fridge full of stuff at home. Instead of virtue signaling, fix the school formula or pave some roads. Attract some businesses. To say that this last legislative session was a success despite their “one” failure lol is an attitude that will lead to more of an erosion of that simple majority. Plenty of us can’t wait for it because it’s obvious this group wants to virtue signal, not lead.
If every political jurisdiction thought this way, nothing would get done on climate change. The point is, we have a responsibility to do our part. That’s what the Democrats believe, and that’s what they did.
If “our part” means spending what limited resources we to create a forced “solution” on something totally ineffective, then maybe “our part” is wrong. We should be concentrating on resiliency, not fantasizing about how Vermont will “lead the way.”
I’m not saying we need to “lead the way,” but I do believe we need to do our part. Not to mention that affordability concerns are vastly overstated, depend on stable fossil fuel prices, and ignore the longer-term savings to be realized from a short-term investment in renewables. And the economic advantages of producing more of our own power and sending fewer dollars to out-of-state energy companies.
We still haven’t done anything John, our current legislature doesn’t understand basic economies of scale. I could go completely carbon-free and the amount of energy I saved was offset by Microsoft AI creating one picture of a duck wearing a fedora. Nothing our brave little state does matters, but enacting draconian standards does. I’m for weatherization and things like that, but to make Vermont unaffordable when AI and crypto mining are existential threats we are powerless against makes me wonder if they listen to their constituents. I don’t think it was a coincidence that my Clean Standard Lovin Rep got waxed by a moderate fuel dealer. If I was a Dem outside of CC, I’d start paying attention.
Somehow I don’t think we’re going to find common ground on this. It’s not that Vermont — or any other political jurisdiction, up to and including China — can single-handedly turn the tide. It’s that we all have to do our part. I also disagree with the “draconian” characterization. The Dems’ plan is a solid step in the right direction, but nowhere near “draconian.” As I’ve written before, there are tremendous economic advantages to greening our energy supplies. Indeed, China has the most ambitious plan of any nation for pivoting away from fossil fuels and toward renewables. They know the early adopters of green energy will have a significant edge on the rest of the world.
When are we going to acknowledge that this election was a red wave in where voters punished the governing party? And even then, analysis indicates it was narrow and the Dems actually lost rather than the GOP winning (kinda like what happened in the UK election earlier this year but much less so). This isn’t rocket science. This is also not some seismic shift in where Vermont is now on its way to becoming a solid red state so now the state must be like Florida because “jobs” or something. When VTDems scored huge wins in 2022, it’s curious that nobody was talking about how the GOP should be more liberal and pro-urban or pro-woman. Caring about climate change is not virtue signaling, most voters also voice concern about it, even conservative ones. It’s not a losing cause. I hate this double standard that when Dems have losses, they are chewed out and told to embrace hardline or oppositional policies to appease the people that didn’t vote for them while the GOP gets a free pass to do whatever they want and ignore most voters with the expectation that they’ll notch wins in the future anyways because “Boys will be boys” kind of mentally.
John: meant to say “we have.”