Tag Archives: Kolby Lamarche

All the Weirdness with County Republican Committee Finances

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(The above screenshot was taken on the evening of September 9. As of this writing, on the afternoon of September 10, you can still see this on the Bennington County Republicans’ homepage. Which kind of sums up the tactical and strategic genius of the VTGOP’s county party committees.)

This week, I’ve spent waaaay too much time digging through campaign finance reports from September 1. I’d already done the requisite review of statewide candidates*, and then I started looking around at political committee reports, a jungle where few choose to enter.

*Not sure if it’s really “requisite” anymore since our major media completely ignored the filings. Sigh.

And boy, did I ever hit a rich vein of weird.

What I found, in brief, is that the Vermont Republican Party continues to struggle financially, but some of its county committees are raking in the cash while others have little to nothing. The well-funded committees are in solidly Republican or uncompetitive Democratic counties, so the money is kind of pointless. And the fortunate committees are spending their loot in very different ways, many of which seem irrelevant to the presumed goal of winning elections.

I’m telling you, none of it makes sense. Some of it might trigger legal jeopardy if there was any oversight or enforcement regimen for campaign finance. Which there is NOT, at all.

Here’s a little soupçon to whet your appetite.

The Orleans County Republican Committee spent $15,000 on travel expenses for Lt. Gov. John Rodgers.

I’ll just let that sink in for a moment.

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That “Big Tent” Lacks an Entrance or Two

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It was probably inevitable that Kolby LaMarche would resign as chair of the Burlington Republicans. A bit less so that he left the GOP altogether. But here we are.

Whenever she’s asked about extreme elements in the party, VTGOP chair Deb Billado resorts to the “big tent’ analogy. The party, she says, is big enough to include all comers.

Nice theory, but it’s not working in practice. The kind of die-hard Trump supporters who still believe he was cheated out of the election are more than welcome in the party ranks and, what the heck, leadership. But people like LaMarche, who believe the GOP must abandon the Trump delusion, are made to feel so unwelcome that they eventually leave. And the party’s rightward tilt gets that much more pronounced.

If the VTGOP really believes in the “big tent,” then Billado and her colleagues would be pounding the phones, begging LaMarche to give them another chance. Somehow I doubt that’s the case. Because to the chair and her allies, including vice chair Deb Bucknam and national committee members Jay Shepard and Suzanne Butterfield, fealty to Trump is a litmus test for good Republicans. Not to mention local party officials like Ron Lawrence of Essex, co-instigator of the CovidCruiser that went to Washington for Trump’s attempted insurrection on January 6. That’d be the same Lawrence who launched a petition drive to get Gov. Phil Scott to abandon his party affiliation.

Yes, the Phil Scott who is the one and only Republican success story in statewide elections. According to Lawrence and the 2200-odd signers, he’s the real problem in the VTGOP.

Did Billado rush to Scott’s defense? Uhh, no. She “declined comment” on the petition, claiming she hadn’t read the thing and wasn’t involved. No “big tent” references this time.

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Running Out of Metaphors Here (UPDATED) (UPDATED AGAIN)

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Things just keep getting better and better for the Vermont Republican Party.

The latest eruption is in the GOP heartland of Burlington, where three members of the city party committee are calling for the removal of city party chair Kolby LaMarche because he’s insufficiently reverential toward Donald Trump.

Because being a Trumpster is such a great way to win elections in Burlington, I guess?

LaMarche sinned against orthodoxy by writing opinion pieces saying that the VTGOP needed to move away from Trump and return to “the Vermont Republican roots that formed the basis of our state party,” in the words of a written statement he released Friday. He had also called for a change in state party leadership; most of the VTGOP’s top officials are dyed-in-the-wool Trumpsters.

The three who want LaMarche removed are Ericka Redic, spectacularly unsuccessful candidate for state Senate in 2020; Gus Klein, a weapons tester at General Dynamics who’s best known as the guy whose Trump flag was vandalized by two teenagers back in 2018; and his wife AnnMarie Klein.

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The Strange Tale of Kid Swastika and the Scummy Consultant

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There’s a curious whiff of white nationalism around the Scott Milne campaign. The fresh-faced youngster above, Kolby Lamarche, is Milne’s director of field and digital operations. Lamarche became notorious back in 2017 when he used a Hindu swastika as his profile picture on his school email account. The Hindu version is slightly different from the Nazi swastika, but more than close enough to trigger the reaction he got — and seemed to welcome at the time.

Next we have Texas-based Harris Media, which has collected $16,000 from the Milne campaign for graphic design and online advertising. In recent years, Harris has created campaign advertising for some of Europe’s finest ultra-nationalists, including France’s Front Nationale and Germany’s Alternative fur Deutschland.

Is Milne is secretly assembling an All-Star team of neo-Nazis? Of course not. But the hiring decisions seem… shall we say… curious at best, and stupendously ignorant at worst. I mean, why go out of your way to hire a teenager and an out-of-state consultancy that might create bad publicity? Especially when you’re trying to wrap yourself in the Phil Scott cloak of plausible moderation?

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