Category Archives: Vermont Republican Party

Musical Chairs

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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.”

Now, back to the Republicans.

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The Next Apology Will Be the First One

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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.

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I Tried to Tell You About Sam Douglass (and There’s a Lot More Like Him)

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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.

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Let’s Take a Moment to Marvel at the Dispassionate Reasoning of Vermont Conservatives

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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.

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John Rodgers Does Not Give a F***

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Following his surprise victory over David Zuckerman last November. Lt. Gov. John Rodgers was widely seen as the Great White Hope of the Vermont Republican Party, someone capable of succeeding Gov. Phil Scott. I don’t buy it myself; I think he’s more likely to be the next Scott Milne than the next Jim Douglas. someone who enjoys a brush with electoral success but can never repeat it.

And the primary reason for my belief is that John Rodgers simply does not give a fuck.

The first sign of this was his live interview on local TV the morning after Election Night, when he chose to make his initial public appearance as LG-elect looking like he’d just rolled out of bed and stationed himself in front of the camera wearing a decidedly non-gubernatorial white T-shirt.

The most recent sign is this: Back on February 4, I wrote a post entitled “Bad Grammar, Typos, and Plagiarism: Welcome to John Rodgers’ Official Biography.” In the first line of his bio, he is identified as “the 84rd Lt. Governor of Vermont.” That’s right, “84rd.” There followed a cornucopia of misspellings and offenses against the English language. It was an embarrassment, not only to Rodgers but to the state of Vermont.

You’ll never guess how he responded to this revelation.

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Whistling Past the Elephant in the China Shop (UPDATED)

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Update. Within 24 hours of this post going live, the governor announced his first (and so far only) concrete response to the Trump presidency: an interagency task force to assess the potentiial impacts of Trump tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico. Must have been a complete coincidence, right?

You might think that the deliberately shambolic start of the second Trump presidency would have been a major topic at Gov. Phil Scott’s January 30 press conference. After all, in a very short period of time Trump has issued a blizzard of executive orders, many of dubious legality and/or constitutionality, that are designed to radically recast or possibly euthanize the federal government. The one most directly pertinent to governing the state of Vermont was Trump’s since-withdrawn threat to put an immediate halt to a wide range of federal payments. (The threatened imposition of tariffs on Canadian imports would have had a profound effect on Vermont, but they hadn’t been bruited as of January 30 and have since been put on hold.)

You might think the specter of Trump would have dominated Scott’s presser, but you’d be wrong. The topic of the day was, shocker, “affordability,” especially with regard to Scott’s housing plan and his extremely modest tax reduction plan. Which, at $13.5 million, would average out to a scant $20 a year for every Vermonter.

(Of course, it wouldn’t be distributed evenly. The three elements of his plan are (1) an expansion of the Democrats’ child tax credit, (2) an end to state taxation of military pensions, and (3) an end to state taxation of Social Security benefits. The latter two, aimed largely at retirees, seems an odd way to address Vermont’s demographic challenges. Our biggest demographic shortfall is in mid-career adults, who are mainly too old to benefit from a tax credit on young children and not old enough to benefit from the other two provisions.)

Neither Scott nor his officials voluntarily addressed how Trump setting fire to the federal government might impact Vermont. None of the assembled reporters asked a single question about it until the 44-minute mark in a 47-minute presser. Almost an afterthought, then. But Scott’s response was highly informative — for what he didn’t say, more than for what he did.

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A Rising Tide Lifts All the Flotsam

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This month’s Republican wave deposited some worthy members who can bring a socially moderate, fiscally conservative perspective to the Statehouse with some measure of dignity and open-mindedness. Not that I agree with them politically, but they should not be dismissed as extremists or nay-sayers. (Lookin’ at you, incoming Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck.)

But others who floated in on the tide will bring some truly out-there positions to Montpelier. There have always been a few of these folks, but too few to feel comfortable about spreading their wings and exposing their views. They have limited their participation to grumbles and grimaces and often departed after a term or two because they couldn’t stand being in a tiny minority. Or because the voters got wind of their views. (Lookin’ at you, one-term state rep Samantha Lefebvre.)

In the new biennium, there might just be a critical mass that will give them license to fly their freak flags. I can give you five names of far-right figures previously featured in my posts about “stealth conservatives” who won their elections and will take office come January. There are another eight on my suspect list who campaigned on the standard-issue “affordability & common sense” Phil Scott word cloud but showed signs of dog-whistling. I haven’t had a chance to dig into their histories. Yet.

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Two Vermonts, Again, Again

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The phrase “Two Vermonts” has a long and storied history. Its roots run deeper than the origins of Vermont itself. Way back when, our B.L. Not Yet S. was the tattered rope in a tug-of-war between New Hampshire and New York. And then, for much of the Vermont Republican Party’s 100-year-plus hegemony, a governor from the eastern side of the state was inevitably succeeded by someone from the west. There was a very clear division between the two Vermonts tracing the spine of the Green Mountains.

If you do an Internet search for “Two Vermonts,” you get a staggering quantity of hits. It’s been a long time since the line was about east versus west; instead, various divisions are drawn by a writer or speaker in service of the argument they are making. The two Vermonts have been defined as, among other things: The places, rural or urban, where people are prospering versus those whose inhabitants are struggling to get by; The places where real people work hard at real jobs versus the realms of the picture-postcard; The locales struggling with drugs and crime versus the enclaves of the well-to-do and the tourists; Rural/parochial areas versus urban/cosmopolitan ones.

There are also non-geographical conceptions of Two Vermonts: A simple divide between prosperity and poverty, or between a Vermont that seriously engaged with climate change and another where harmful emissions are still on the rise.

I’ve got a new spin on this concept based on this month’s election results. If you follow I-89 from Burlington to White River Junction and I-91 from there to Brattleboro, you will have traversed one Vermont. The rest of the state, or most of it, is the other Vermont. Neat, eh?

You can see this most clearly in the incoming state Senate. There are 17 members of the Democratic/Progressive caucus, and fourteen of them hail from counties on that freeway corridor: Chittenden (6), Washington (3), Windsor (3), and Windham (2). The other three hail from Bennington (2) and Addison (1).

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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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Phil’s Friends: “Jesus Believed In the Flood Model”

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Poor ol’ Phil Scott. After getting repeatedly overridden by the Legislature’s Democratic/Progressive supermajorities, he’s desperate to get more Republicans into the House and Senate.

Not desperate enough to try to build a political movement or exercise influence over the Vermont Republican Party, mind you. But desperate enough to endorse some, shall we say, decidedly fringey characters posing as “common sense” fiscal conservatives.

Take Michael Boutin of Barre, last seen in this space when, as a member of City Council, he cast the sole “No” vote on the sale of Main Street’s Wheelock Building to the owners of East Montpelier’s very successful and LGBTQ+-friendly Fox Market. Boutin had earlier led an unsuccessful petition drive aimed at blocking the sale. Which is truly strange, because Barre’s Main Street can use all the vibrant businesses it can get.

Back in 2021, Boutin maneuvered to block the proposed display of a Black Lives Matter flag in the city’s downtown by offering a charter amendment limiting acceptable flags to four: the Stars and Stripes, the state flag, the city’s flag, and the POW/MIA banner. Boutin shows definite signs of far-right intolerance, I think it’s fair to say.

Boutin is not an altogether bad guy; his Facebook page is full of civic boosterism and pet photos and the occasional foray into Trekdom. But there’s one big strange exception: a video excerpt from a Christian talk show featuring, as the clip’s title puts it, “Christian Professor Disproves the Theory of Evolution.”

Hoo boy. Rabbit hole alert.

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