Repeat After Me: “It’s Only a Movie”

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Sen. Chris Bray seems to have contracted a mild case of the fantods regarding his prospects for re-election to a [checks notes] seventh term in office. He’s raised quite a bit of money, and he’s spent even more than he’s raised. Before the August primary, he and fellow Addison County Sen. Ruth Hardy spent big against a challenge from Rep. Caleb Elder that, frankly, was doomed from the start. As I said in my previous post, incumbent senators just don’t lose unless they’ve committed gross malfeasance, aged beyond the electorate’s tolerance, or done something equivalently heinous.

And now, Bray is spending beyond his means against a surprisingly well-funded challenge from Republican Steven Heffernan (and a not-nearly-so-well-funded challenge from Republican Landel Cochran). And I get it; in his position, he shouldn’t be taking anything for granted. But I’m here to tell you that Bray ain’t losing. Heffernan’s odds are roughly equivalent to a snowball in a very hot place.

Look. Besides the fact that incumbent senators never lose, there’s the district. It’s been a full generation since Addison sent a Republican to the senior chamber: Tom Bahre in 2000, the year of the great civil unions backlash. Since then, two Democrats every two years for a grand total of 22 elected Dems to zero Republicans. In 2022, Bray and seatmate Ruth Hardy each received more than 33% of the vote, while third-place Republican Lloyd Dike lagged with 16.4%. Republicans have routinely finished far out of the running in Addison, except for those years when the GOP didn’t even bother to field candidates.

Yes, Heffernan is a more credible figure than Dike, one of the radical right hopefuls who co-signed a 2022 newspaper ad denying that global warming exists and asserting that greenhouse gases are actually good for us and the planet. Heffernan isn’t one o’ them. But he’s not winning, either. Not in Addison, not in a Senate race against two established Democratic incumbents.

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The Senate Reset of 2024

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The campaign for Vermont Senate is the main battleground in our rather underwhelming 2024 election season, thanks to a number of open and potentially competitive seats. Plus there’s little on the statewide ballot to divert attention, and the Dem/Prog supermajority in the House appears to be safe. That leaves the Senate, where key vacancies have attracted strong candidates and very generous donor support.

I’ve written previously about the highly unusual, possibly unprecedented, amount of turnover in the Senate between the 2022 cycle and this year’s: 2022 saw the departures of ten sitting Senators, fully one-third of the entire chamber. Six more incumbents will be absent next January through retirement (Brian Campion, Jane Kitchel, Dick McCormack, Bobby Starr) or death (Dick Mazza, Dick Sears).

Furthermore, five of the six vacancies are in districts that haven’t been seriously contested in years because of long-established, nigh-unbeatable incumbents. That’s especially impactful because sitting senators are virtually bulletproof. The last time an incumbent senator lost a bid for re-election was in 2016, when Bill Doyle and Norm McAllister were defeated. Doyle was 90 years old and had developed a widely-known habit of falling asleep during hearings; McAllister faced a bunch of criminal charges.

That’s about what it takes for an incumbent senator to lose. Which means this year’s winners are likely to be in office for a long time to come. Those are high stakes.

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It’s Last Call at the Campaign Finance Saloon, and Some of Us Are Already Drunk

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Well, it’s not literally last call, but in practical terms it’s pretty damn late. Thanks to universally accessible mail-in voting, the longer a candidate waits to spend money, the less impactful it will be. As a result, some candidates (whose fundraising perhaps outpaced expectations) seem to be shoveling money out the door as quickly as they can.

First, a note about the calendar. In the home stretch of a campaign, the deadlines come thick and fast. Candidates are required to file on October 1, October 15, and November 1. Also, in the 45 days before an election they’re required to report any mass media expenditures of $500 or more within 24 hours. The rationale, I believe, is to provide as much clarity as possible about late-stage campaign activity. The problem is, gaining clarity would require (a) each voter diligently poring over the reports, or (b) robust media coverage of campaign spending. The former is an impossible ask, and the latter is largely a thing of the past given the tremendously reduced ranks of our political press corps.

Anyway. There’s little earthshaking in the new reports; they only cover two weeks. But there are some items worthy of note, and here they are.

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Scott to Homeless: Talk to the Hand

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Alleged “nice guy” Gov. Phil Scott has done more than his share of garbagey things. The constant belittling of the Legislature, the persistent passive-aggressiveness, the blame-shifting and refusal to take responsibility for anything that happens, the stubborn adherence to policies that don’t work even as problems continue to worsen, just off the top of my head. But I don’t know if anything tops — bottoms? — what his administration did on Wednesday about the state’s deliberate mass unsheltering of vulnerable Vermonters.

What it did — well, what it actually did was nothing whatsoever. What it hinted that it was planning to do, in off-the-record leaks to Vermont’s two biggest TV news operations, is set up “at least two shelters for families, with a projected completion date of Nov. 1″ according to WPTZ, which reported that the shelters would accommodate “11 families, including 21 children.” (WCAX reported that “three new shelters for homeless families” were in the works.)

This is just despicable on a number of levels. First, it’s so inadequate that it’s practically an insult. Hundreds of households, totaling at least 1,500 vulnerable people, have been unsheltered since mid-September, and the state’s plan is to provide for about 30 of them?

Second, WCAX reported that state officials are “aware of”… “at least 21” children left unsheltered. That’s bullshit. There are far more children than that who’ve been affected by new limits on the GA housing program. And they know it. (They admitted it this morning. See below.)

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The Groundhog Day of Our Disgrace

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One month later, nothing much has changed. Except that the humanitarian crisis then foreseen by advocates for the homeless has become a reality that ought to scar our consciences and lay to rest any claim we have to moral superiority, to the comfortable myth of Vermont as a better, more caring place.

It was on September 15 that a group of advocates gathered in the Statehouse to sound the alarm about the completely predictable unsheltering of close to 2,000 vulnerable Vermonters due to new limits on the GA emergency housing program. They gathered again on October 15 to sound the alarm yet again, as the unsheltering has proceeded apace and state leaders have refused to lift a finger to stop it.

“We are working frantically to keep people from dying,” said Julie Bond of Good Samaritan haven (pictured above, with former Brattleboro town manager Peter Elwell and Frank Knaack of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont looking on). “The situation is impossible, it is immoral, and it is untenable.”

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The Barons Take On a Junior Partner

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It must be nice to have so much money that you can afford to crank out thousand-dollar checks by the bushel and hardly notice it.

Safe to say the Barons of Burlington are in this category, because they continue to broaden their roster of Republican state Senate candidates, each new one seemingly less likely than the last. The newest tchotchke in their collection: Larry Hart, Sr. — or alternatively Larry Wayne Hart — this year’s challenger to Orange County’s nearly perpetual incumbent Democrat Mark MacDonald.

Mr. Hart has previously featured in this space as a mystery candidate who had failed to submit any campaign finance reports. At first I took this to mean that he wasn’t doing anything and hadn’t even bothered to submit a No Activity Report. I heard later that he’d boasted of having $30,000 in the bank. Well, now we know, and the truth is just about exactly in the midpoint of those two speculations. And the bulk of his money came from, you guessed it, the Barons of Burlington. Some of ’em, anyway.

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The Donkey in the Room

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The coverage of this year’s Vermont elections — including, often, my own — generally ignores one factor that will outweigh any of the issues or trends we explore ad nauseam. This includes (1) the much-anticipated tax revolt, which may or may not be a reality, (2) the Barons of Burlington’s plot to kill the state Senate supermajority, and (3) the Democrats’ failure to mount a serious challenge to Gov. Phil Scott. Or anything else you could name.

I refer to the national election. The race for president and the battle for Congressional majorities. This cannot be ignored in any assessment of Vermont’s elections.

There is always a substantial jump in turnout between a midterm election and the ensuing presidential. Since 1994, the smallest jump was between 1994 and 1996, with a 16.7% increase. The biggest was between 2012 and 2014, with a 38.8% increase. The average midterm:presidential increase in that period was 24.1%.

Not all cycles are created equal. 2012:2014 was an outlier on each end, with high turnout for Barack Obama’s re-election followed by 2014’s plunge due to a lackluster gubernatorial contest between mortally wounded incumbent Peter Shumlin and dismally bland challenger Scott Milne.

(Brief digression. The 2014 election was the outlier of all outliers, as Shumlin suffered a catastrophic drop in support.. He’d won 170,749 votes in 2012 — and only 89,509 in 2014. Milne, who very nearly beat Shumlin, actually drew 24,000 FEWER votes in 2014 than losing Republican Randy Brock had in 2012.)

But while not all cycles are created equal, there’s a clear and obvious pattern. A lot more Vermonters go to the polls when the presidency is at stake than when it’s not.

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Kiss of the Five-and-Dime Woman

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You’ve got to give Lenore Broughton credit for persistence. Or maybe slam her for testing that old saying about the definition of insanity. Because she is, in #vtpoli-land, the living embodiment of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Broughton is Vermont’s leading ultraconservative donor. She’s spent $32,620 this year on Vermont political organizations and politicians, and the vast majority are losing causes. (She’s also dropped more than $50,000 so far on the federal level, none of which has gone to Vermont Congressional hopefuls Gerald Malloy or Mark Coester.)

She’s been backing the wrong horses for so long that one might wonder if a candidate might, upon receiving a missive from her, scrawl “Return to Sender” on the envelope and drop it in the nearest mailbox. Problem is, most of ’em can’t afford to. Unlike the candidates backed by the Barons of Burlington, most of the people Broughton supports don’t have any cash to spare.

For those unfamiliar, Broughton is the famously reclusive Burlington resident with a strong aversion to being photographed. (A Seven Days piece from 2012 about a successful attempt to take her picture no longer includes the image, perhaps because the photographer later expressed regret over the whole thing. VTDigger snapped a photo of her at a public meeting, but she was holding a piece of paper over her face.)

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Jim Douglas Manfully Bears the White Man’s Burden

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I came onto the scene a bit too late to get the full Jim Douglas Experience. Moved to Vermont in 2006 (which, yes, still a flatlander, I know, should I really be allowed to vote?) and didn’t pay much attention to #vtpoli until the 2010 campaign, when Dead-Eyed Jim was on his way out the door and into a fairly inert retirement. I have to admit, I see photos of this guy with his characteristically vacant non-smile, and I just don’t get the appeal. Like, this picture on the cover of his terrible memoir (see below), presumably chosen or approved by the subject, makes him look like he’s contemplating a bit of cannibalism.

But I will say this. If Douglas wanted to find a cause celebre to occupy his Golden Years, it’d be tough to find anything more apropros than defending the good name of a long-dead governor from the merry days of Kipling-style white supremacy. If any modern-day figure seems made to carry the threadbare mantle of those unenlightened times, it’s Jim Douglas. And here he is, spending years and clogging up the courts in his defense of former governor John Mead, whose most infamous contribution to our civic life was his enthusiastic advocacy for eugenics.

Douglas took one for the team last week when a judge issued a decidedly unfriendly ruling in his lawsuit over Middlebury College’s decision to take Mead’s name off the college chapel, the most prominent building on campus. It’s one of those rare stories in our perilous times that made me chuckle over my corn flakes.

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The Barons of Burlington Are Trying to Buy the State Senate

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Pictured above is a curious sort of politician: He presents himself as a simple farmer, a rural populist who gives voice to the voiceless — meaning people who live outside the Burlington area. But John Rodgers, former Democratic state lawmaker turned Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, has seen his campaign picked up off the mat by major backing from Chittenden County elites. The Barons of Burlington, you might say.

These same people are writing batches of four-figure checks to a handful of Republican candidates for state Senate who have some chance of winning. The goal, clearly, is to kill the Democratic/Progressive supermajority in the Senate and end the truly historic string of veto overrides in the current biennium. It’s a longshot; the Republicans would need a net gain of four seats to end the supermajority. But if Rodgers wins, they’d only need three because the potential tie-breaking vote would be in their back pocket.*

*Correction: THe tie-breaking vote might be useful but not for veto overrides. If there’s a tie on an override, it’s already lost.

A few months ago, this Barons of Burlington thing was kind of cute. Like, can you really expect to swing an election with a sprinkling of large donations? Now, it’s looking like a serious, coordinated effort beyond anything I’ve seen in my 12+ years of walking this beat. I mean, all these people writing identical checks to the same handful of candidates? It’s beyond anyone’s notion of coincidence.

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