Tag Archives: Dexter Lefavour

Another Event I Won’t Be Attending

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Mark your calendars and then make other plans! This is the weekend of Libertystock, a Gathering of the Disaffected on a farm in Cabot which I like to think of as Klar-a-palooza. Libertystock’s market positioning is nicely encapsulated in the above T-shirt: an ultraconservative slash Libertarian message in alt-culture clothing.

It sounds like a downright tedious event. And it’s emblematic of the central problem of the far right in these parts: Way too many aspirational chiefs, nowhere near enough Indians, if you’ll pardon the dated turn of phrase. If you go a-Googling for conservative organizations in Vermont, it’s downright amazing how many you can find. All of them are starved for membership.

Anyway, Libertystock includes speakers, musicians, performers, and vendors in what its website describes as “an amazing event in a beautiful location” that will almost certainly draw an embarrassingly small audience. Probably more than VT Grassroots’ recent “modest but impassioned crowd of 25,” but I’d say there’s a very good chance that the performers, speakers and vendors will outnumber the actual attendees.

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A few numbers that surprised me

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While prepping for my weekly guest spot on Brattleboro’s WKVT Radio (available in podcast form here), I spent some time looking over the Vermont election returns from last Tuesday. And i found some things that surprised me. (All taken from the Secretary of State’s unofficial results.)

For starters, here are three numbers.

166,807

139,252

178,572

The first two are the vote totals for Phil Scott and Sue Minter respectively.

The third? The number of votes in Vermont for Hillary Clinton.

Does that surprise you? It surprised me. Clinton outpolled Phil Scott by nearly 12,000 votes. Sue Minter fell disastrously short of Clinton’s total.

If Minter had simply been able to ride Clinton’s coattails, she would have won the governorship.

(And if Democrats had been smarter when they had legislative majorities and the governorship, they would have established a straight-ticket option on the ballot. Just sayin’.)

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Big donors, big money in targeted House districts

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Two years ago, the Republican State Leadership Committee funneled $370,000 into Vermont, backing candidates in close races for the Vermont House. The VTGOP won several of those seats and took away the Democrats’ supermajority status.

So far this year, the RSLC has spent a lot less. But a handful of closer-to-home moneybags have taken matters into their own hands. They’ve donated more than $100,000 to individual Republican House candidates and House Minority Leader Don Turner’s political action committee.

In the small-dollar world of State House campaigns, that’s a huge amount of money.

First, a hat tip to Green Mountain Daily’s Sue Prent, who reported on the Franklin County iteration of this phenomenon a couple weeks ago. Turns out, it’s only part of a bigger pattern. But because the money is broadly dispersed, the pattern has attracted little attention.

Two of the donors are familiar names to anyone who follows Vermont politics. The other two might be new to you.

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