The inevitable has occurred, to the surprise of no one paying the slightest attention. Former Senate pro tem Tim Ashe, pictured here alongside some guy, has declared his candidacy for State Auditor. This has been inevitable since current Auditor Doug Hoffer hired Ashe as his chief deputy back in 2021. It became extra-double inevitable when Hoffer made it clear he would not run for re-election in 2026.

Both men wear the same political label as Democrat/Progressives. Both hail from Burlington. Both have ties to Bernie Sanders. Both are the kind of policy/financial nerds who would make good small-a auditors. All indications are they have worked well together in the capital-A Auditor’s office.

So yeah, of course Ashe is running for Auditor. And assuming the Vermont Republican Party can’t do any better than nominating the likes of H. Brooke Paige, he’s almost certainly going to win.

But the most politically impactful thing about this announcement has nothing to do with the man. It’s all about that D/P thang.

Apologies for those who already know this, but the Progressive Party’s fortunes, perhaps its very existence, depend on retaining major-party status under Vermont law. That ensures a Progressive line on the state ballot. In order to be a major party in a Vermont election, one of its candidates in the preceding election must have earned at least five percent of the vote. That includes candidates listed with dual allegiances.. As long as Hoffer (D/P) or That Guy, David Zuckerman (P/D), were incumbents on the ballot, the Progs were assured of remaining a major party.

But Zuckerman lost in 2024 and Hoffer won’t be on the ballot this year. So it’s vital for the Progressive Party that Ashe remains a D/P. And for those who enjoy conspiracy theories, what could the Democrats offer Ashe to drop the P?

I don’t think that’ll happen because, frankly, the Vermont Democratic Party doesn’t have the organizational discipline to pull off that kind of chicanery. But a more realistic scenario is the emergence of a straight Democrat in the race. Could the Dems produce a candidate of their own to try to elbow Ashe aside in the August primary? That’s a possibility, although it’d be difficult for that hypothetical Dem to match Ashe in terms of name recognition or political connections. I mean, take a look at the “What Vermonters Say About Tim” page of his campaign website. It includes praise from a shit-ton of prominent Democrats, mainly those who served with Ashe in the Senate, including many centrist Dems.

In fact, the page is just a little bit creepy because the people who Say Stuff About Tim include at least three dead guys — former senators Dick Mazza and Dick Sears and former representative Curt McCormack. They can’t possibly be endorsing Ashe for Auditor because of that being dead thing. But they can testify from The Great Beyond to Ashe’s Democratic bona fides.

(Those providing attestations also include such living specimens as current Senators Ginny Lyons, Andrew Perchlik, Ann Cummings and current Pro Tem Phil Baruth, former senators Bobby Starr, Jane Kitchel, Michael Sirotkin, Jeanette White, Chris Pearson and Mark MacDonald, former representative Janet Ancel, and current Rep. John O’Brien. It’s unclear whether any of these people are actually endorsing Ashe’s bid for auditor; it’s just stuff Vermonters Say About Tim. But it’s a long list of Democratic heavyweights, seemingly designed to forestall a primary challenge.)

Enough of that. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Ashe runs and wins, which seems a solid bet right now. What kind of auditor would he be?

Let me say, first of all, that I think highly of Hoffer’s auditorship. He is a Progressive who believes that government has a crucial, wide-ranging role to play in society — and bears the responsibility to do its work as responsibly and efficiently as possible. He has done yeoman’s work in shining a spotlight on the performance of state government, not that his efforts have been rewarded with respect or even attention from the executive or legislative branches. Ashe would seem to be cut from the same cloth: a progressive slash Progressive-minded person with a strong interest in good government.

However…

There’s the matter of his tenure as Pro Tem, when he coddled the dinosaurs who stomped around the Statehouse in the last years of the Senate’s Campho-Phenique Era. Ashe rarely seemed terribly progressive, small-p or capital, during his time as Pro Tem. The agendas were rarely aggressive, and attitudes toward the House were decidedly frosty. The same can be said for Baruth, so maybe Ashe was doing his best to manage a cranky caucus in a chamber that values tradition and tenure above all else. On the other hand, Becca Balint seemed able to push the Senate in a more progressive direction and maintain a productive relationship with the junior chamber. So did Ashe sacrifice progressive principle for the sake of managing the Senate? Was he less able than Balint to thread the needle? Or is he, in actual fact, not that progressive at all?

Here’s another concern: What if Ashe sees the office as a convenient rung on the political ladder? Hoffer never had any interest in being anything but auditor. If Ashe has designs on, say, being governor someday, there’d be a natural inclination to go a little easy on the Powers That Be. The longer Hoffer was in office, spinning out damning audits of state agencies or telling inconvenient truths about sacred cows like Tax Increment Financing, the less attention he got from the P.T.B.

That’s not to say Ashe wouldn’t put in a solid day’s work as auditor. It is to say that his ambitions might affect how tough he is in doing the job. Not that it matters much, really; chances are he’s going to be our next auditor, and it seems likely that his performance will be somewhere between adequate and pretty damn good. And the auditor’s position, as vital as it is in the pursuit of excellence in government, is kind of an appendix in the power structure of the state. Auditor’s reports can be safely ignored by the people who make the real decisions. It would help if the media provided more coverage of audits, thus increasing the pressure on officials to respond. But the media’s performance has been extremely uneven in this regard.

Speaking of which. It was inconvenient of Ashe to launch his candidacy on January 2, a day tucked between a holiday and a weekend. Even so, Seven Days managed to produce a creditable story about it. As of this writing, sometime after midnight on January 3, it’s been crickets from VTDigger and Vermont Public, two of the three crown jewels in our media ecosystem. Doesn’t fill me with confidence.