Tag Archives: Andrea Murray

The Barons Didn’t Buy the Senate, But They Dramatically Increased the Price of Admission

1 Reply

Throughout the campaign season I wrote about the Barons of Burlington, a bunch of well-heeled men — well, almost entirely men — and their obviously coordinated effort to buy a bunch of state Senate seats. They wrote fistfuls of four-figure checks to six Republican candidates for Senate plus their choice for lieutenant governor, Democrat-turned-Republican John Rodgers.

So, now that the dust has settled and the campaign finance reports are nearly complete*, it’s time to answer the musical question: Did the Barons buy the election?

*Final reports are due December 19, but the bulk of the money has been accounted for by now.

The obvious straight-line answer is yes. Their seven chosen candidates swept the field, reducing the Democratic/Progressive majority from 23 seats to 17 with the tie-breaking LG vote going to the Republicans.

The less obvious answer is, well, not really. There is abundant evidence that their money didn’t swing the election — that the Republican gains would have happened anyway.

Continue reading →

Kiss of the Five-and-Dime Woman

1 Reply

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.)

Continue reading →

Don’t Change Bulls in the Middle of a Run

1 Reply

Well, it’s time for an update on Andrea Murray’s finances.

The far-right-posing-as-a-moderate candidate for state Senate in Windsor County has finally caught up on her homework. She filed her October 1 campaign finance report and her September 1 report at the same time — on September 30. As Maxwell Smart would say, “Missed it by that much!”

The new numbers show more of the same: Spending a lot of her own money, raising very little outside her own household, and paying big money to an out-of-state political consultancy. But this time it’s a different consultancy.

That’s right, shortly before the primary, she apparently dropped the Las Vegas-based McShane LLC and started paying Illinois-based Cor Strategies. She also brought on board, as a paid consultant, a failed far-right candidate for local office. Good times.

Continue reading →

That’s a Whole Lotta Bull, Ma’am

2 Replies

You could almost feel sorry for Andrea Murray.

She’s a far-right Republican candidate for state Senate in solid blue Windsor County — a district that hasn’t elected a single Republican to any of its three seats since 1994.

Nineteen ninety-four. That’s 30 years ago. Fifteen elections ago. Forty-five Democratic winners ago. In recent years, Republicans have consistently lost by roughly two-to-one margins.

Murray is, naturally, presenting herself as a common-sense Republican who merely wants to bring “balance” to Montpelier. In fact, on her campaign website she offers three rationales for her candidacy, and the first is that she “will work across the aisle.” She’s also got prominent Republicans running interference for her. As noted previously, LG candidate John Rodgers has endorsed her as “a moderate woman.” She also claims the backing of former governor Jim Douglas, the cheapest date in #vtpoli.

Let me tell you about this “moderate.” Less than a year ago she was trying to get rid of longtime Windsor County Republican chair John MacGovern, whose sole offense was that he didn’t like Donald Trump. If Murray can’t get along with MacGovern, I’d like to see her definition of “work across the aisle.”

So why do I almost feel sorry for her? Well, she’s dumped a bunch of her own money into the campaign and spent much of it on an out-of-state consultancy that’s doing her absolutely no favors. And like I said, she’s going to walk into a buzzsaw on Election Night.

Continue reading →

We Regret to Inform You that John Rodgers Has Drunk the Kool-Aid

3 Replies

The Republicans’ candidate for lieutenant governor, John Rodgers, is seen as a potential winner for the victory-starved VTGOP: a centrist politician who served in the Legislature as a Democrat and might pull moderate voters away from incumbent Progressive/Democrat David Zuckerman.

Well, maybe we should pump the brakes on that one. Because to judge by the above graphic, Rodgers has taken a Wile E. Coyote-style dive into the deep end of conservative Republicanism.

Two things of note. First, he’s endorsing Andrea Murray, a far-right candidate for state Senate in deep-blue Windsor County. He promotes Murray as “a moderate woman,” which is a goddamn lie. Murray and her husband August were described by the Valley News’ Jim Kenyon as the “ringleaders” of the move to get rid of John MacGovern as chair of the Windsor County Republicans. MacGovern is a very conservative fellow and a very active Republican, but he is not a fan of Donald Trump. That was too much for the Murrays and their ilk; they undertook a long, noisy, divisive, and ultimately successful effort to oust MacGovern. They were so het-up over MacG’s apostasy that they actually filed a lawsuit against him and the Vermont Republican Party. A suit that was basically laughed out of court, but whatever happened to Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment?

There is more, much more, to say about Ms. Murray, but that will have to wait for an upcoming post. For now, let’s move on to point two about Mr. Rodgers.

Which is, look at the company he’s keeping.

Continue reading →

So the VTGOP’s Big Plan Is… Try to Take Jane Kitchel’s Senate Seat? Is That It?

3 Replies

Previously we looked at the dire financial straits of Esther Charlestin’s candidacy for governor, where she barely cleared $12,000 in a race that calls for, by Howard Dean’s reckoning, at least 164 times that much money. Now it’s time to look at the Republican side of the ledger, where pretty much everybody can rightly cry poverty.

With one notable exception.

That would be state Rep. Scott Beck, running for the Northeast Kingdom Senate seat currently occupied by retiring Democrat Jane Kitchel. Beck has raised a rather stunning $35,565. (His likely Democratic opponent, Amanda Cochrane, has raised a respectable $7,165 and enjoys Kitchel’s active support.) Beck appears to be the only Republican candidate who has raised more than enough money to run a respectable race. Besides, of course, Gov. Phil Scott, The Exception To Every Republican Rule,

More to the point, Beck and the governor are about the only two Republicans who aren’t complete embarrassments when it comes to fundraising. Which shows you just how desperate the party’s situation is.

The VTGOP ought to be in a position for a nice little comeback in the Legislature, threatening to end the Dem/Prog supermajorities that imperil every single one of Scott’s many, many, many vetoes. And they’re not.

Instead, the wistful eyes of the donor class have largely turned to putative Democrat Stewart Ledbetter’s bid to wrest away a Senate seat from liberal Democrat Martine Gulick or Progressive firebrand Tanya Vyhovsky. Ledbetter has amassed the largest campaign kitty of any Statehouse candidate thanks primarily to Burlington-area business leaders. You know, the very people who would historically be bankrolling Republicans.

Continue reading →