Tag Archives: Barons of Burlington

Wise Investments, and Other Notes from the State Senate Home Stretch

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As I have noted previously, 2024 has been a barn-burner of a time for state Senate fundraising. Thanks largely to the Barons of Burlington writing bushels of four-figure checks and Democratic donors striving to keep pace, a lot of money has gone into some potentially close Senate races.

Some candidates were clearly taken by surprise at the amounts raised, because they’ve got a lot left with precious little time to spend it. The result: Senate hopefuls have made a blizzard of mass media buys in the second half of October, even as statewide campaigns have seemingly ended major expenditures. (Since Phil Scott and John Rodgers made their big radio splurge on October 28, there have only been two mass media filings by statewide candidates, and they add up to less than $2,000.)

But the Senate, that’s a different story. The mass media reports continue to come flying in. Mostly. There have been no late spends in Franklin or Windham, where the incumbents are safe as houses. (Lamoille’s Richard Westman just rolled in on October 31 with $7,303 spent on postcards and online ads.)

At the other end of the scale we find two districts not known for high rollers: Caledonia and Orleans, where longtime Democrats Jane Kitchel and Bobby Starr are retiring and every major-party candidate has spent tens of thousands of dollars. The number-one late spender on our list: Rep. Katherine Sims of Orleans, with $16,417 spent on mass media since October 15. Her Republican counterpart, Samuel Douglass, has spent $4,705, so late spending in Orleans totals more than $21,000. In Caledonia, Democrat Amanda Cochrane has spent $11,242 while Republican Rep. Scott Beck has laid out $6,603, for a district total of nearly $18,000.

I guess there’s at least one economic sector booming in the Kingdom.

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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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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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