Category Archives: Vermont Republican Party

Hey, Let’s Take an Early Check on the Republican Ticket and… Oh.

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The Vermont Republican Party has a long record of losing statewide races except when the name “Phil Scott” is on the ballot. Scott is still undefeated for the entirety of his political career going all the way back to 2000, when he rode the anti-civil union wave* into the state Senate. Otherwise, it’s been solid goose eggs for the VTGOP in statewide contests since the Jim Douglas era, if memory serves.

*Seems unbelievable now, but the Republicans nearly swept Washington County’s three Senate seats that year. The late Bill Doyle** finished first, Scott second, and Republican J. Paul Giuliani almost ousted two-term incumbent Democrat Ann Cummings. But we were all much older then, we’re younger than that now.

**Correction: “The late Bill Doyle” is still with us at age 97. My apologies.

Otherwise, the top of the Republican ticket has featured tons of fringey no-hopers with a sprinkling of old-fashioned conservatives. Lately it’s been more of the former, as the far right has seized control of the VTGOP apparatus. And it’s looking like 2024 will be no exception. Not only do we have the soundly defeated Gerald Malloy making another bid for the U.S. Senate, but the even more soundly defeated Gregory Thayer has staked his claim to another bid for lieutenant governor. (The Vegas wise guys have set the over/under on joint campaign appearances featuring Thayer and Scott at… zero.)

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The Death of Nuts-and-Bolts Political Reporting

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My previous post concerning the party reorganization process could have been written a couple weeks earlier. That’s when the information became available. I just plain didn’t get around to it immediately because (1) other stuff got in the way and (2) I was pretty confident that no other media outlet would bother with it.

And I was right. Nobody in Vermont covered it. In fact, nobody in Vermont is covering the nuts-and-bolts of politics anymore. Party reorgs, hirings, departures, leadership changes, party finances: they’re off the agenda. No one routinely (well, really, ever) attends state party committee meetings, conventions, or big fundraising events.

You also see a lot less reporting on individual politicians’ campaign finances. Filing deadlines used to be big occasions. Back when reports were filed in person, political reporters would gather at the Secretary of State’s office to grab the reports and file stories. Everything’s digital now, so all you have to do is open up the SoS campaign finance website and hit “refresh.”

It’s a lot easier. And yet, little to no attention is paid.

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Party Reorg: The Rich Get a Little Bit Richer (Updated)

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Note: This post has been updated with comment from the Progressive Party, see below.

This fall, Vermont’s political parties have undertaken their biennial obligation to reorganize themselves. It’s quite the task. The parties have to encourage members across the state to take part in town caucuses and establish town committees.

The process Is now over and the results are in. The Vermont Democratic Party had the biggest success, organizing town committees in more than 170 communities (they’re still totting up a few stragglers). The same process two years ago resulted in 150 Democratic town committees. That’s a nice bump, considering (a) they had less room to grow than the Republicans or Progressives, and (b) given the flood and all, it wasn’t the best year for encouraging turnout at political meetings.

The Vermont Republican Party lost a bit of ground, falling from 132 town committees in the 2021 reorg to 120 this time around. The Progs saw a modest increase from 44 towns in 2021 to 48 this year.

So what does it mean?

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Once Again, Phil Scott Ducks Accountability for Being a Republican

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The Vermont Republican Party held its biannual, or possibly biennual, convention on Saturday. (Above screenshot from the VTGOP’s own website, although they might get around to fixing it after they read this post.) They actually had kind of an impressive speaker lineup, including Reagan-era anti-tax activist Grover Norquist (who must have been wondering how the hell his career descended to the point where he was sharing breakfast with a few dozen graybeards in frickin’ Burlington), Scott Brown, who’s gotten an incredible amount of mileage out of one lucky victory thirteen years ago, and Georgia state Rep. Mesha Mainor, who switched her affiliation from Democratic to Republican after differing with her former party’s caucus on some high-profile issues.

All of which makes me think that there are some conservative deep pockets underwriting the travel schedules of far-right figures, because ain’t no way the VTGOP could have pulled this level of “star” power in the past. But anyway…

Speakers also included professional troll Scott Presler, a gay conservative dudebro who was touted as a get-out-the-vote activist. Not mentioned in your convention program: His stint as a lead organizer for an anti-Muslim hate group, his description of the January 6 “Stop the Steal” election denial gathering as “a civil rights protest,” and his promotion of false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Oh, and his version of GOTV includes the all-out promotion of “ballot harvesting,” a common conservative complaint about Democrats collecting and delivering ballots en masse. If you’re unfortunately enough to remember the film “2,000 Mules,” which focused on unsubstantiated claims that liberal activists were harvesting huge numbers of questionable ballots, well, Presler wants to take that idea up to 11: “”I don’t want 2,000 mules. I want 2 million mules,” he told a GOP voter training session in Pennsylvania.

I can’t tell you whether he brought the same message to the Waterfront Hilton, but it seems likely.

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The VTGOP is Finally a Trendsetter — But Not in a Good Way

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Is there such a thing as Chronic Wasting Disease among political parties? Because if there is, an epidemic is brewing among state Republican parties. Suddenly, in several key states, GOP coffers are alarmingly empty in a way that calls to mind the Vermont GOP’s underperformance over the last several years.

Last week, the conservative National Review published a piece called “The Quiet Collapse of Four Key State Republican Parties” that chronicled the woes of the GOP in Arizona, Colorado, Michigan and Minnesota — states “that would be tantalizing targets in a good year.” In addition, the Georgia GOP “is spending a small fortune on the legal fees of those ‘alternate’ Republican electors from the 2020 presidential election.”

The problem, according to the National Review’s Jim Geraghty, is “the replacement of competent, boring, regular state-party officials with quite exciting, blustering nutjobs” more concerned with culture war and ideological purity than the tedious work of party-building.

Sample nutjob: in my home state of Michigan, formerly the home of bland conservatives like Fred Upton and Gerald Ford, the state GOP is now helmed by election conspiratorialist Kristina Karamo, who not only believes that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, but so was the 2022 election in which she lost her bid to become secretary of state by a mere 14 percentage points.

The result of such leadership: Parties in battleground states that are racked by infighting and barely have two nickels to rub together.

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The VTGOP Is “Helping” Phil Scott Again

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Gov. Phil Scott is kinda busy these days with, among other things, talking to the Biden administration and our Democratic Congressional delegation about federal flood relief.

So naturally, Vermont Republican Party chair Paul Dame thought this was an ideal moment to flog the “Biden Crime Family” nonsense. Dame’s weekly commentary, delivered today to the select few on the VTGOP mailing list, is loaded with conditional assertions and misleading phraseology, all in service of the long-discredited narrative that Joe and Hunter Biden are international racketeers of the basest sort.

Good thing for the governor that nobody takes Paul Dame seriously outside his tiny band of true believers (who, unfortunately, occupy most of the leadership positions in the state party). Otherwise, Scott would have some ‘splainin’ to do the next time he picks up the phone to talk to administration officials.

Dame does his level best to whomp up some outrage from the steaming “Biden Crime Family” pile of Santorum. And fails. But his effort is yet another stain on the reputation of a once-respectable political organization — one that ruled Vermont for more than a century and produced remarkable figures like George Aiken, Bob Stafford, Dick Snelling, and Jim Jeffords.

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The Loneliest Overwhelmingly Popular Governor in Town

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At last week’s press conference, Governor Nice Guy spent much of the time wearing his Frowny Phil mask. Lots of unpleasant subjects: The still unsettled emergency housing program, all the veto overrides, plus Auditor Doug Hoffer’s scathing report on his pet administrative project, the Agency of Digital Services, which gave him the opportunity to unfurl an obviously scripted and vigorous defense of ADS. (Outgoing ADS Secretary Shawn Nailor was in on the presser for no reason at all, just in case some reporter asked about the agency. When the question did arise, Scott and Nailor just couldn’t stop trumpeting the former’s vision and the latter’s execution.)

On top of all that, he had the opportunity to wallow in his profound political isolation. Not a lot of fun for a politician with an approval rating of, what was it, 163 percent or something?

Gov. Scott was clueless about how we’ve arrived at the point where an historically popular leader is on the short end of historically lopsided legislative supermajorities, and had no idea what he might be able to do about it. Plus he made it clear that his divorce from the Vermont Republican Party is complete and irrevocable.

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If a Political Committee Does Something Stupid in the Forest, Does It Make a Sound?

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You know, if the Burlington Republican Committee wasn’t a bunch of hateful fuckers, I might feel a little bit sorry for them. They went to all the trouble of writing a painfully detailed resolution denying the very existence of transgender folk and complaining of bathroom incursions by people posing as trans, “authoritarian censorship” of their views on gender, “an alarming increase in violent attacks” on people such as themselves… and oh, so many other things. There’s a grand total of 17 “Whereases” and seven “Be It Resolveds.” It has the distractingly busy look of a Dr. Bronner’s Soap label.

The resolution was first reported on June 23 by Guy “Scoop” Page at the Vermont Daily Chronicle.

The Committee burped out this thing on… April 25. And then sent it to Mayor Miro Weinberger and the Burlington City Council.

Yikes. All that hard work, all that hatred spewed onto a single crowded page, and nobody noticed for almost two months.

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The Young Republicans of Vermont Cordially Invite You to Get Jiggy With… Russ Ingalls?

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Lookout world, the Young Republicans of Vermont are throwing a “Spring Fling” this Saturday at that most swingin’ of venues, the Elks Lodge in Barre. Wowie zowie.

Oh, but that’s just the beginning. The main attraction is a panel discussion featuring five Republican lawmakers, only two of whom have the slightest claim to the title “young Republican.” The guys who’ll be wearing the Steve Buscemi “How do you do, fellow kids?” costumes are Sen. Russ Ingalls and Reps. Tom Burditt and Patrick Brennan. Scintillating.

The other two panelists are a bit more germane: Reps. Casey Toof and Joe Parsons. Toof at least represents the most vibrant county in Republican politics, Franklin County. But c’mon now, you’re trying to gin up an exciting evening for young conservatives, and this is the best you can do?

But the real kicker is the complete absence of women. I mean, they don’t have a lot to choose from, but no Patricia McCoy? No Ashley Bartley? Think, fellas! Put your minds to it.

Then again, when you see the topic of discussion, you get a sense of how much brain power went into this event. Which is to say, not much.

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If You’ve Stuck Your Head Up Your Fundament, Keep On Pushing Until You See Daylight

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This past weekend, former Vermont Republican Party Executive Director and Ashley’s husband Jeff Bartley posted a lengthy thread on Twitter about what’s wrong with the party and how to try to fix it. The thread was thoughtful and substantive. And there’s not a chance in hell that the VTGOP will pay him any heed. Instead, the party is doubling down on the strategery that landed it in the political wilderness.

I can tell because at its most recent meeting, the party’s state committee doubled down on election denialism. It appointed a special subcommittee to investigate Vermont’s “election operations, procedures and integrity.”

(This from the Vermont Daily Chronicle because no mainstream media outlet bothers to cover state party meetings anymore.)

That’s right, having failed to get anywhere with its much-touted (and still extant) Excess Ballot Reporting Form, the VTGOP is broadening its search to include every potential source of funny business in the desperate hope of finding any. Because the alternative is to actually admit that it’s losing elections because its policies are deeply unpopular.

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