Tag Archives: Chris Mattos

Doing Something: A Follow-Up

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Yesterday’s installment of “Doing Something,” my daily report on Doing Something Every Day in response to Trump’s assault on the government, democratic norms, and the rule of law, was about emails I had written to the chairs of the Vermont House and Senate Judiciary Committees. I suggested that one or both of the panels should hold hearings on how various state agencies and departments cooperate with (or are complicit in, your choice) Trump’s crackdown on people of color who are in the United States legally. I provided a starter list of questions and state agencies that should be included in such hearings.

Credit to both chairs, Sen. Nader Hashim and Rep. Martin LaLonde, for getting back to me within hours. More is likely to come, but I wanted to report back on what I’ve learned so far. Which is that neither of them needed my encouragement to become actively engaged on these issues.

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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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The Business Elites Expand Their Portfolio, and Other Notes from the 9/1 Campaign Finance Filings

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Well, those Burlington-area business types have slightly expanded their playing field as they try to weaken the Legislature’s ability to override gubernatorial vetoes. They’d backed a handful of centrist Democratic challengers to Dem/Prog incumbents (most notably Stewart Ledbetter and Elizabeth Brown*, only to see them all go down to defeat. (A similar effort was made by Brattleboro businessfolk in support of an unsuccessful challenge to Rep. Emilie Kornheiser.) They also backed some Republican hopefuls with a chance to knock off Democratic incumbents in November including LG candidate John Rodgers, two state reps running for Senate, Pat Brennan and Scott Beck, and the uncle-and-nephew tag team of Leland and Rep. Michael Morgan, running in a two-seat House district currently split between the two parties.

*We’d previously noted that Brown spent an appalling $35 per vote. It was actually $35.42, for those keeping score at home.

And now that same bunch of Vermont-scale plutocrats is throwing their weight, in the form of four-figure donations, behind Rep. Chris Mattos, running for Senate in the Chittenden North district currently repped by Sen. Irene Wrenner, and Steven Heffernan, Republican Senate candidate in Addison County. (A district that, according to Matthew Vigneau, solid Twitter follow and bigger election nerd than I, hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate since the year 2000. Which was the year of the great civil-unions backlash that saw Republicans win in multiple unexpected locations, so grain of salt required.)

I haven’t come across any similarly blessed Republican candidates for House, but I didn’t do an exhaustive search. Then again, perhaps these low-grade plutocrats have decided (as have I) that the House is a lost cause for the Republicans.

So who’s giving how much to whom?

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

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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.

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