Category Archives: Vermont Republican Party

Okay, so Dan Feliciano is doing a little better than I thought.

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But he’s still losing in a landslide.

The Libertarian gubernatorial candidate’s write-in bid for the Republican nom went absolutely nowhere. With about 80% of the votes counted, Scott Milne has 72% of the vote; Steve Berry and Emily Peyton are both at about 7%, and almost 15% of the votes were write-ins.

All we’re getting tonight is a total write-in tally. It’ll take a few days to determine whether all of those 15% were Feliciano scribbles or if some of them were for Daffy Duck or Bullwinkle T. Moose.

Safe to conclude that Feliciano will manage to edge out Berry and Peyton. And he might try to paint a double-digit write-in finish as a moral victory of sorts. But still, it’s got to be embarrassing to the prominent Republicans who abandoned Milne and supported this doomed effort.

Except that we’re talking about people with an extremely high embarrassment threshold.

Question: Will top Republicans like Mark “Little Snell” Snelling and Brady Toensing now endorse Scott Milne? Or will they just hold their breath until they turn blue, like the statesmen they are?

Also, on the Democratic side, Governor Shumlin now has 77% to H. Brooke Paige’s 16%. Good God, are there really 2,557 voters willing to elect the Obama birther as our Governor? Sheesh.

The other news is the recently-launched and unofficial effort to get write-in votes for the recently cashiered Doug Racine. Write-ins accounted for 6% of the Democratic tally, so I guess he got a few.

 

The Milne campaign does something smart. Stop laughing, I mean it.

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Do Not Adjust Your Set. It’s True, It’s Damn True.

Scott Milne’s people, a.k.a. Brent Burns, put out a press release listing the names of prominent Republicans who have endorsed his candidacy.

And it’s an impressive list. 42 names of current and former officeholders. It puts to shame the tiny number of dead-enders and no-hopers who’ve opted for Libertarian Dan Feliciano.

It begins with former Governor Jim Douglas, the shining star of contemporary Republicanism. Unlike other people I could name (ahem, Phil Scott), Douglas has come out of his hidey hole and actually campaigned for Milne. His endorsement alone is worth approximately 1,000 Darcie “Hack” Johnstons.

After that, you get most of the VTGOP’s Senate delegation – Bill Doyle, Joe Benning, Norm McAllister, Peg Flory, and Kevin Mullin. From the House, add Kurt Wright, Heidi Scheuermann, Patti Komline, Chuck Pearce, Tom Koch, and Duncan Kilmartin and many more, plus former Rep and current Senate candidate Pat McDonald. A couple of interesting names: former Representative and current Senate candidate Dustin Degree and current Rep. Tony Terenzini, neither of whom are particularly moderate folks.

This primary-eve blast should put to rest any talk of a Feliciano groundswell. A couple of state party officials may have turned their backs on Milne, but the bulk of its officeholders – those with proven appeal to actual voters – are solidly behind him.

 

Vermont conservatives step out onto an invisible bridge

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What do you do if you’re a small frog in a big pond? Well, you can be content with your lot and get along with the bigger frogs; you could move to a smaller pond; or you could drain the big pond until you’re the biggest frog left standing.

The third course is the preferred option of Vermont conservatives. The likes of Mark “Little Snell” Snelling, Brady Toensing, John McClaughry, and Wendy Wilton have seemingly opted out of Lt. Gov. Phil Scott’s party-broadening operation; they’re backing the longshot write-in campaign of Libertarian Dan Feliciano for the VTGOP gubernatorial nomination. They’re likely to end up with egg on their faces and crow on their plates when the votes are counted; Scott Milne is virtually assured of taking the nomination if only because his name is on the ballot and write-ins are hard.

But their strategery does have a certain logic, an internally consistent reading of history. It’s dead wrong, natch, but there is a narrative. It’s like this: over the last 50 years or so, the Republicans have done best when they lean right, even when it means short-term defeat. (This storyline is the subject of Rick Perlstein’s three-volume history of the rise of the right; the just-published third book, “The Invisible Bridge,” chronicles the years between Richard Nixon’s resignation and Ronald Reagan’s national ascendancy.) Nixon killed the Sixties; Reagan established the rise of the right; George W. Bush took it even further. On the other hand, temporizers like Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney proved to be electoral dead ends.

Which is why so many conservatives truly believe the best course for the Republican Party is to nominate Ted Cruz. And why a small cadre of Vermonters are backing Feliciano.

It’s a coherent, logical view of national political trends. But it doesn’t apply in Vermont and the Northeast. Conservative Republicanism is pretty much dead in New York and New England*; the rare Republican winners are all moderates.

*Maine Governor Paul LePage is a Tea Partier, but an electoral fluke; he won with less than 40% of the vote in a three-way race.

In Vermont, it’s been decades since a true conservative won anything important. Republican winners have all come from the center or center-right: Dick Snelling, Jim Jeffords, Jim Douglas, Bob Stafford. And in the latter days of the Republicans’ Hundred Year Reich, the George Aiken wing led the way.

In short, that long national arc has completely bypassed Vermont – and the Northeast, for that matter. The national conservative ascendancy is based on four factors that have nothing to do with the Northeast: the GOP’s co-optation of southern whites, growing anti-government sentiment in the West and Southwest; Christian conservatism; and the generous support of deep-pocketed One Percenters like the Koch brothers and Foster Friess. None of that applies in Vermont. If anything, the trend in this neck of the woods is to the left. Even in hard-bitten old New Hampshire. To see a growing conservative movement in Vermont is to see dancing cartoon unicorns or pink elephants. There may have been an Invisible Bridge between Nixon and Reagan; but usually when you step onto an invisible bridge, you wind up all wet.  

 

The Milne Insufficiency

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Several days ago, I wrote a highlight-reel glance at this month’s campaign finance reports. Scott Milne’s meager report was mentioned; $22,370 for the past month, and $42,790 for the entire campaign.

That’s bad enough, but when you look more closely, things are… you guessed it… even worse. Milne’s fundraising effort, as unsuccessful as it’s been, is highly dependent on a handful of out-of-state donors who’ve already given the legal maximum of $2,000. Those top-dollar gifts account for $32,000 of Milne’s total. His in-state fundraising is nearly nonexistent, and he hasn’t roused any significant support among the Common Folk.

In my deadline-day post, I noted that $16,000 of Milne’s $42K was thanks to his connection to the Boies family, whose paterfamilias, David Boies, is a high-powered Washington attorney. His son, David Boies III, was a college roommate of Milne’s and is currently his business partner in a real estate development firm.

I was wrong. Let’s make that $20,000 in Boies-related cash. Two of the $2,000 donors on Milne’s reports are Timothy Battin and Rebecca Anderson. They are married, or at least an established couple, and he is a partner in daddy Boies’ law firm.

For those keeping score, that’s almost half of all Milne’s money coming from his Boies connection.

It might be even more. There are some common surnames on Milne’s max-money list, and those are tough to pin down via The Google. Any could have an undiscovered Boies tie. They include: John S. Edwards III and Mark Williams of California and Mark Sutton of Arizona. There’s also a New Jersey corporation, AJI, LLC, which I couldn’t positively identify.

But here’s something about Sutton. He is owner of Meridian Engineering, which also gave $2,000 to Milne for Governor. And here’s a possibly unrelated note from a recent Milne profile by The Freeploid’s Terri Hallenbeck:

He was living in Arizona in 1987, working as a field engineer for an electronics firm and starting a family, when his parents talked him into returning to Vermont and buying part of their travel agency.

So 18 years ago Milne was working “as a field engineer” in Arizona and now he’s pulled in $4,000 from a guy who owns an engineering firm in Arizona. That’s a stretch, but it makes more sense than “Some random dude gave Scott Milne four G’s.”

There’s reason to believe that Milne has received as much as three-quarters of his money from his well-tended Rolodex. He certainly hasn’t scored in his own home state; he’s raised roughly $10,000 from Vermonters. That’d be a nice total for a State Senate candidate, but it’s downright pathetic for a major-party gubernatorial hopeful. It’s surprising – shocking – to me that he hasn’t done better in-state. Even as a political outsider, an established businessman should have a lot of friends and associates who could be counted on to open their checkbooks. But no, not at all. And it seems obvious that the Republican establishment is giving him the cold shoulder.

As for Milne’s appeal to The Little Guy, he has raised a paltry $1,060 in gifts of under $100 from a whopping total of 24 separate donors. Not exactly evidence of a groundswell-in-the-making.

Maybe this is all part of His Big Plan, as Milne continues to insist. Maybe he turned to his old pals and partners to jumpstart his campaign, and now he’s cranking up the engine on his in-state machine.

Maybe. But I doubt it. And if that is, indeed, his plan, then it’s far too little and way too late.

 

It can’t get any worse, can it? …Yes, it can.

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Just a note from the Ship Of Doom, a.k.a. the Vermont Republican Party. Honestly, being a Vermont Political Observer these days is like watching a budget remake of Das Boot — bad shit keeps happening and you know they’re not gonna make it back home, you just never know when the deathblow will actually come.

So anyway, the latest dispatch comes to us from the Twitter feed of Brady Toensing, the Vice Chair of the VTGOP. He Tweeted the news that he’d cast an absentee ballot in the gubernatorial primary.

For Dan Feliciano, the Libertarian.

Welp, that makes two of the Republican Party’s four top officers who’ve abandoned Scott Milne, the Party’s chosen candidate. The other, of course, was Mark “Little Snell” Snelling. Their endorsements came in spite of Party Chair “Super Dave” Sunderland’s strongly-worded letter warning fellow Republicans not to go Libertarian.  

This is not just bad news for the Milne campaign, but for the all-new Vermont Republican Party. Last fall, Lieutenant Governor Phil Scott promoted a slate of party officers in an effort to broaden the party’s appeal. Snelling and Toensing were holdovers from the Jack Lindley VTGOP.

And now they’ve turned their backs on Milne and Sunderland… and, implicitly, on Scott’s efforts to broaden the party. 

Best of luck to Victory Campaign Director Jeff Bartley. He’s got a hell of a job in front of him.  

 

Hypocrisy in the debate debate

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Aww. Scott Milne pulled out of a Republican gubernatorial debate again today.

Can’t say I blame him, since the other three candidates aren’t really seriously competitive, and it might diminish his standing to share a stage with them.

Except, of course, that he’s been doing such a bang-up job of diminishing his own standing with no outside help. Besides, his decision to basically ignore the Republican primary stands in stark contrast to (1) his constant complaining that Governor Shumlin won’t start officially campaigning until after Labor Day, and (2) VTGOP Chair David Sunderland’s constant complaining that VT Dem chair Dottie Deans won’t accept his asinine debate proposal publicity stunt.

Besides, given the state of Milne’s campaign, he could use all the free media he can get. If he had shown up, the event would have probably drawn a lot more coverage.

Also, frankly, Milne could use a little live-fire practice. He’s been depressingly tongue-tied on the campaign trail. He could maybe sharpen his skills a bit in a low-stakes debate where he ought to be able to clean the clocks of his small-timey challengers. He’d better damn well up his game before he gets into the ring with Peter Shumlin, that’s for sure.

I feel bad, being so negative about a guy whose mother died a week ago. But time and political campaigns wait for no man, and he put himself behind this chronological eight-ball by waiting until June to begin his candidacy. I am, literally, the least of his worries.

Yes, it got worse for Vermont Republicans. Except Phil.

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Notes and musings from the August 18 campaign finance report filings…

— Governor Shumlin is in cruise control. His campaign raised another $67,000 this time, and spent only $11,000. He has almost $1.13 million in the bank.

— Scott Milne continues to falter. He raised $22,370 this time, compared to $20,000 last time. That pace won’t get him anywhere near his stated goal of $200,000. And his total was again buoyed considerably by the Boies family: $2K from a Christopher Boies, $2K from daddy Boies’ law firm, and $2K from an LLC whose address is the same as the daddy Boies law firm. For those keeping track, the collective Boieses have donated $16,000 of Milne’s total of $42K. He also raised $2K from Altour International, a high-end travel agency based in New York. His biggest in-state donor was the Wayside Restaurant, which donated $2K. That’s a lot of ham and eggs.

Milne spent $28,000 in the past month, of which more than $18K went to campaign manager Brent Burns’ consulting firm.

— The alleged Republican upstart, Libertarian Dan Feliciano, reported raising $13,000. Sounds decent, but $10K of that came from Dan himself. He had only a handful of other donors — notably getting $200 from Republican Treasurer Mark “Little Snell” Snelling. There’s no sign of a Feliciano bandwagon to be found in his finance report.

— The Vermont Republican Party is still in the doldrums, raising $2,420 in the past month.

— The only Republican doing really well is Lieutenant Governor Phil Scott who, challenged by Progressive Dean Corren’s public financing, put his fundraising operation into high gear and pulled in $52,000 in the past month. He didn’t spend a whole lot, and has $120,000 in cash on hand. He got plenty of cash from construction firms (his line of work) and from some of his turncoat friends in the Senate Democratic majority — a total of $2500 from Dick and Dorothy Mazza, and $200 from “Bobby Star,” who I believe is actually State Sen. Bobby Starr.

Scott’s doing well for himself, but to judge from the latest reports, he ain’t lifting a finger for his beloved VTGOP.

— Vermonters First, which spent a million Broughton Bucks in 2012, is still in hibernation. Raised zero, spent $25 for a bank account.

— Lenore Broughton did open her checkbook for a few Republican candidates and gave $2K to the Common Sense Leadership PAC. Said PAC didn’t raise any other money but managed to spend $3500 on consultants. Namely $2K to Shayne Spence, a staffer at the Ethan Allen Institute, and $1500 to Elizabeth Metraux who is apparently the PR person for Vermont PBS.

— Republicrat Senate hopeful Roger Allbee pulled in a decent $4760 this time around for a grand total of $6K. His total take included a nice $1,000 donation from soon-to-be-ex-Senator Peter Galbraith. The Slummin’ Solon, who has publicly endorsed Allbee, was nonetheless chosen to moderate one of the four Windham County Democratic Senatorial candidate forums, a curious move to be sure. (During that debate, he reportedly got into an argument with fellow Senator Jeanette White. Not very statesmanlike or diplomatic, Petey.)

— Celebrity tidbit: The aforementioned Senator White can brag of a $100 donation from Mr. Tom Bodett. Leavin’ the light on for ya!

On Jim Jeffords

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I don’t have much to add to the outpouring of words, messages, and comments on the death of former Senator Jim Jeffords. I didn’t move to Vermont until his very last year in office; and by then, he had largely withdrawn from the public sphere. But, for what it’s worth, here’s my two cents.

Jim Jeffords was a rare politician: one willing to vote his conscience even if it offended his colleagues. As a liberal, I cheered his decision to go independent in 2001 and tip the balance of power in the U.S. Senate. I could well understand why he did so: the Bush Administration was clearly intent on pushing the country far to the right. W’s definition of “bipartisanship” was “my way or the highway.” Not to mention that Bush was a terrible President, and the more power he had, the worse it was for the nation and the world.

 That said, I can understand why Jeffords was a villain to so many Republicans: after putting up with the Reagan years and the anti-Clinton madness of the 90s, he chooses to leave the Republican Party just when it hurt the most – when it tipped the balance of power in the Senate. It’s not unlike how Virginia Democrats feel about ex-Senator Philip Puckett, who resigned after being offered a cushy job. His departure and replacement by a Republican tipped the balance in the Virginia Senate.

 The two cases are not the same, obviously; Jeffords wasn’t offered a cushy job. But the impact was the same.

 And while Jeffords honestly felt he had no place in the modern-day GOP, his departure was the death knell for moderate Republicanism in Vermont. He served as a powerful example to other moderate Republicans, that the party had nothing to offer them. And for conservative Vermonters, I’m sure he became a symbol of moderate perfidy. I imagine that the antipathy toward Phil Scott’s moderate movement expressed by the likes of Darcie Johnston and Jack Lindley is largely engendered by Jim Jeffords’ apostasy. Honestly, if I were a conservative, looking at Phil Scott (or another moderate) in light of my experience with Jeffords, would I trust him to uphold the values of the GOP as I see them? Might I fairly view Scott as another potential turncoat? There’s certainly been speculation aplenty that Scott might someday run for Governor as an independent.

 I’m not saying that any of this is Jim Jeffords’ fault. He had abundant reason to believe that he was already an outcast in the Bush-era Republican Party. He didn’t cause the death of New England moderate Republicanism; he was just the last and loudest one to go. For that, he will always be a hero to liberals, and a turncoat to conservatives.

It would be fascinating to see an alternative timeline where Jeffords stuck it out as a Republican, and remained healthy and vibrant after his retirement. Could he have been an effective “leader emeritus” of a more moderate — or at least more inclusive — Vermont Republican Party? We’ll never know, but things might have turned out very differently for the VTGOP.

RetreatFour

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Concerning the further misadventures of RecruitFour, the one-man Facebook page attempting to identify write-in candidates for the four statewide vacancies on the VTGOP ballot — Attorney General, Auditor, Secretary of State, and Treasurer. 

When last we visited that sorry precinct, RF had put forward nominees for three of the four slots, only to have two of them decline the “honor.” Turned out, RF was promoting people without asking them first. Which would seem to be, y’know, a prerequisite. 

Anyway, the RecruitFour guy has scrubbed the page of all its references to the two decliners. Congrats on a belated burst of common sense, RF Guy. 

The third prospective write-in candidate, however, has stepped forward and accepted the honor. Burlington attorney Shane McCormack has launched a campaign for the Republican AG nomination. He’s got himself a nice basic WordPress site with minimal content, as befits a minimal candidate. 

Not that this will make any difference to incumbent Dem Bill Sorrell, but it’s nice to see that RecruitFour’s “efforts” haven’t been entirely misdirected. Its page still promises to identify write-in candidates for Auditor, Secretary of State and Treasurer; presumably, if RF Guy picks a name out of the phone book or whatever, he’ll have the decency to contact the potential candidate before putting him/her out in public view.

Still a publicity stunt

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VTGOP Chair “Super Dave” Sunderland continues to push his hokey “challenge” to meet his Dem counterpart, Dottie Deans, for a debate on the Vermont economy. He first threw down the gauntlet in a letter dated July 10, and has occasionally refreshed it via Twitter ever since. Last night, for instance:

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Funny, it hasn’t drawn a reply from Deans, nor has it attracted the slightest interest from the Vermont media. Pretty sure I’m the only person who’s reported it (outside of GOP circles), and that’s only been to make fun of it.

Because it’s a publicity stunt, and Super Dave knows it. He knew from the start that Deans wouldn’t respond. He was just hoping for a little free publicity, or simply for the chance to call Deans a coward.

Which she isn’t, not at all. She’s kinda busy these days, having a strong party apparatus and a robust staff to manage. I realize that Super Dave is just kinda rattling around in his largely empty VTGOP headquarters (paid staff: TWO, and both probably part time*) and thus has time to issue bogus challenges. And I realize that he’s grasping at straws for free media. But he knows that it’s not the party chair’s job to engage in public debates.

*Considering that “Victory Coordinator” Jeff Bartley is still on staff at the Tarrant family firm MyWebGrocer and, per his Twitter feed, recently took a trip to Disney World, I doubt that he’s got his shoulder to the campaign wheel 24/7. 

The party chair is responsible for the organization, administration, and growth of a party’s infrastructure. It’s a big job, and it’s primarily done behind the scenes. Dottie Deans knows what her job is, and what it isn’t. You’ll note that, as reflected in the above Tweet, she doesn’t even have a Twitter account of her own. If Super Dave hasn’t achieved a similar level of clarity about his own responsibilities, well, that’s his lookout.

Besides, there’d be little public interest in a debate between two party chairs. The vast majority of voters see high-profile candidates as a party’s public face, not some internal functionary. Voters will pay attention to the Shumlin/Milne debates this fall. They would have no reason to watch a debate between two people who are not running for any office where they might actually affect public policy. 

So it’s a publicity stunt, then, now, and forever.