The brave patriots of the Burlington Republican Committee scheduled a rally in support of Trump’s jackbooted thugs — and then postponed because, well, it might be too cold outside and they want to arrange police protection in case they’re harassed by counter-protesters.
To be fair, it is supposed to be very cold and they could be vastly outnumbered by their opponents. Still, they seem easily discouraged. Maybe they should hold their rally in Bill Oetjen’s living room, which should be (a) comfortably warm, (b) secure from outsiders, and (c) more than large enough to accommodate the entire city committee.
Good thing the Founders were made of sterner stuff, or we might still be paying taxes to the Crown.
Congratulations, I guess? to Paul Dame for his re-election as Vermont Republican Party chair. He overcame a challenge by state Sen. Russ Ingalls in a 50-47 vote at the party’s convention on Saturday.
The margin does not speak of a rousing endorsement for a two-term incumbent. Quite the opposite, in fact. Dame has been in office since 2021, and almost half of the VTGOP’s ruling class wanted him gone? That’s not a positive indicator for Dame’s third term or for the party itself.
Completely absent from the convention, and from the Dame v. Ingalls campaign as a whole, was Gov. Phil Scott. It was a return to his pre-2024 abstention from the Republican political scene, which doesn’t bode well for the party or Dame as we enter a 2026 campaign season likely to be dominated by anti-Trump backlash.
Did the party make the right call? No idea. Ingalls was correct in pointing out that Dame has failed to improve the VTGOP’s dire financial situation, but would the senator have done any better? We’ll never know.
Hey, time for an update on the races for state party chairs! Feel the excitement!
The Vermont Democratic and Republican parties are electing chairs this month. Both races are contested, but that’s where the similarities end. The Democrats are conducting a polite, restrained kind of election, while the Republicans seem to be borrowing heavily from Lord of the Flies.
We’ll do the Republicans first because (a) it’s a lot more entertaining and (b) their election comes first. The VTGOP’s convention is this Saturday the 8th, while the Democrats convene the following Saturday.
Since last I wrote about these contests, incumbent VTGOP Chair Paul Dame has been on one. He’s been campaigning at a furious pace and, ignoring Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment, chastising those who dare support the other candidate, state Sen. Russ Ingalls, who hasn’t been shy about firing back.
Seven Days’ legislative reporter Hannah Bassett is out with a short piece about Larry Hart’s resignation as state senator from the Orange district, not named in honor of Donald Trump’s skin tone. Surprise, surprise, Hart couldn’t take “the frustrations of Statehouse politics,” which generally sideline the concerns and ideas of the minority party.
Yeah, how about that, elections have consequences.
And then we get to paragraph five, which is just an absolute stunner.
Hart also said he grew frustrated by measures advanced by the Democratic majority. He said many of the policies he objected to appeared to be driven by Democratic members who were not born in Vermont. Hart said he anticipates that Republican legislators will introduce a bill in January that would bar anyone not born in the state from running for public office.
Oh, you didn’t seriously think disgraced former (?*) state senator Sam Douglass would learn something from his mistakes? Nah, that’s not how today’s crop of neo-Nazis roll.
*Douglass announced Friday afternoon that he would resign on Monday. But VTDigger has reported** that as of 11:00 a.m. Tuesday, no resignation letter had been received. And as of 12:00 noon Wednesday, Douglass is still listed as a senator on the Legislature’s website.
** Digger also brings us the darkly humorous aspect of this sad affair: Douglass apparently remains chair of the Orleans County Republicans, which means he is in charge of the first steps in the process of filling his vacant (???*) seat in the Senate.
Indeed, Douglass has doubled down on the notion that he is the real victim here, a popular idea in far-right circles. He has taken to GiveSendGo, the Evangelical crowdfunding alternative to GoFundMe, to beg for money from the gullible. And maybe he’ll cash in; he’s counting on the old H.L. Mencken axiom, which is usually a safe bet. But it’s sad that he hasn’t learned a damn thing from the self-induced implosion of his political career.
If there was any doubt about whether soon-to-be-ex-senator Sam Douglass was unfit to hold public office, he removed it with his self-indulgent, clueless resignation statement — newsdumped on Friday afternoon, no less, without ever speaking to a single reporter.
It was longer, that’s for damn sure. It rambles on mawkishly for a page and a half, single spaced. VTDigger has embedded the whole thing in its story on Douglass’ departure, so you can go read it there if you want to. I don’t have the stomach for it.
The heart of the matter is his assertion that he is resigning “to keep my family safe.” So he thinks he’s the real victim, I guess?
Next month could bring leadership changes in both of Vermont’s major parties. On the Republican side, November’s election for party chair has produced a spirited contest. The incumbent faces a challenge from a prominent elected official and seems to be in some trouble with party brass.
More on that in a moment, but first, we’ve got breaking news from the Vermont Democratic Party. Jim Ramsey, who was chosen as interim chair last winter following the sudden departure of David Glidden, will not seek election to a full two-year term. When he succeeded Glidden in February, Ramsey delivered stirring remarks to the VDP state committee, castigating Gov. Phil Scott’s “harmful policies,” calling for the party to field “a competitive candidate” to run for governor in 2026, and concluding “Let’s go to work, and let’s win.”
Well, if any of that comes to pass, Ramsey won’t be around to see it. Here’s how he explained his decision in an email to this observer:
Over the course of the past few months, my work commitments outside of the VDP have been increasing, and much of it is occurring away from Vermont, particularly in Washington, DC. This is expected to continue at least through 2026 and into 2027. As a result, my wife and I will soon be moving there on a full-time basis, and my role as VDP Chair will end when my term expires next month.
Not great news for the party, which has struggled for years to find good leaders and keep them in place. There’s been a lot of turnover in the unpaid position of party chair and the paid staff position of executive director. Now they’ll be breaking in a new chair with the 2026 campaign season just around the corner.
When Ramsey was chosen as interim chair, there was another hopeful in the running: former state senator turned podcaster Andy Julow. Would he be interested in another run? Magic 8-Ball says “Ask Again Later.”
One of my pet peeves of modern journalism is its willingness to slap the label “apology” on things that fall far short of actual apologies, which require an acknowledgement of personal wrongdoing and a real commitment to self-improvement.
It’s bad enough when public figures, usually politicians, get away with the “I apologize to anyone who was offended” routine, which shifts the onus onto those who were offended and implies that the offender didn’t really do anything wrong. What’s worse is when VTDigger gives state Sen. Sam Douglass credit for an “apology” in his first public statement after the explosive POLITICO report that threatens to sink his political career.
It was not an apology, not at all. Douglass did use the words “I apologize,” but not in reference to anything he said or did. Instead, he vaguely waved around in the passive tense about stuff that happened while he might have been in the vicinity but wasn’t paying attention.
And Digger’s headline called it an “apology.” Whoever wrote that headline should read a frickin’ dictionary.
Gov. Phil Scott couldn’t act fast enough to distance himself from newly-disgraced state Sen. Samuel Douglass. Within hours of a Politico report that identified Douglass as an active participant in a racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic Young Republican group chat that reads like a bunch of adolescent boys trying to out-gross each other, Scott had called for Douglass’ resignation — along with Democratic and Republican legislative leaders.
That’s nice, but Douglass’ politics have been obvious for years. His extreme views were out there for anyone to find, long before our “moderate” governor lent his support to Douglass’ 2024 campaign, long before Scott’s buddies in the Burlington-area business community dumped tens of thousands of dollars into Douglass’ campaign treasury.
Scott must have known what kind of person he was endorsing. Unless he pulled a Sergeant Schultz because he needed Douglass-style Republicans to win elections and eat into Democratic majorities.
I know this because, as far back as 2022, I wrote about Douglass’ extreme views. My post wasn’t based on any deep investigative dives; it was the product of simple searches of social media and YouTube. It was all out there for anyone to find. Too bad no one in political authority or our news media bothered to look. Until Politico gift-wrapped the story and dumped it in our collective laps. Now, suddenly, everyone is paying attention.
Thankfully, the tide appears to be ebbing on the Great Statehouse Trans PANIC! of 2025. It’s been days since the Vermont Daily Chronicle could gin up any fresh angles on the ridiculous story. Which, as a reminder, featured a group of Christian conservatives whining — inaccurately — that their free speech rights had been trampled by a handful of trans folk dancing around a Statehouse meeting room. As we previously noted, there is no First Amendment right to deliver speech in a given location or on a given medium.
But before we consign this fiasco to the dustbin of history, we should take note of two particularly ridiculous attempts to exploit this mildest of contretemps. First, a tiny extremist “parental rights” group unwittingly exposing the absurdity of its own claims. And second, the head of the Vermont Republican Party claiming that state lawmakers have a solemn duty to maintain a perfect attendance record.
This will involve a bit of exposure to the rantings of SPEAKVT, a group of far-right rabble-rousers in the Essex-Westford school district. The group’s president Marie Tiemann put out a statement about the March 12 “detransitioning” event sponsored by SPEAKVT and the Vermont Family Alliance. Funny thing, her statement is kind of a self-own.
The Vermont Political Observer. 