Tag Archives: Lenore Broughton

The Barons of Burlington Discover That #vtpoli Is a Cheap Date

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Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas’ brand spanking new campaign finance portal is up and running, and boy howdy, is it an improvement on the old system. Much more information readily available, searchable, downloadable. Too bad nobody in the media, with the occasional exception of VTDigger, pays any attention to campaign finance anymore because (a) the entire idea behind campaign finance law is that sunshine disinfects, but that doesn’t work if the cleanup crews are off the clock, and (b) the new system makes the task much easier.

One huge improvement is the ability to track individual donors. Previously, donor records were extremely difficult to work with. Frequent benefactors would have numerous records, each one bearing a slightly different spelling or punctuation of their name or contact information. If I wanted to track, say, ultraconservative megadonor Lenore Broughton, I’d have to open and review literally dozens of files.

Now all I have to do is click on the “Contributions” button and type Broughton’s name into the “Contributor Name” field, and I can see all her donations to Vermont candidates and organizations in one list. So I can report that so far in 2024, Broughton has shoveled a total of $28,420 into Vermont’s political ecosystem. (This doesn’t include her federal activity; she’s given a whopping $82,700 to federal candidates and organizations in 2024. Including such worthies as Speaker Mike Johnson, Sen. Josh Hawley, unsuccessful Senate hopefuls Eric Hovde of Wisconsin and Kari Lake of Arizona, and an org called Black Americans Political Action Committee, which bears a strong smell of astroturf. She also gave $2,000 to Scary Eagle Man Gerald Malloy. Because he was a federal candidate, that donation was reported to the Federal Elections Commission, not the Vermont Secretary of State.)

The system isn’t perfect. I came across one instance where a donor I think of as an adjutant Baron, Robert Lair, had his name misspelled as “Liar,” so one of his donations didn’t appear with the others. Oh well.

But hey, let’s get to the point, shall we? This being the fifth paragraph already.

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Kiss of the Five-and-Dime Woman

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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.)

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Don’t Change Bulls in the Middle of a Run

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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.

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Phil’s Friends: A Homegrown Mom for Liberty

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As noted previously, Gov. Phil Scott and former gov Jim Douglas were scheduled to hold a meet ‘n greet this evening for Republican legislative candidates in Addison County. They’ll be lending their names and “moderate” reputations to a passel of far-right hopefuls with, um, no hope of winning in a deep blue county.

Take Renee McGuinness, pictured above. Please, take her.

McGuinness is one of two Republican candidates in the very Democratic Addison-4 district, currently repped by Mari Cordes and Caleb Elder. It last elected a Republican in 2016, and the two incumbents cruised to re-election in 2022 by a wide margin. (Elder made an unsuccessful bid for state senate this year; Herb Olson joins Cordes on this year’s Democratic ticket.)

McGuinness is known in Statehouse circles as an advocate for the Vermont Family Alliance, a very conservative organization aligned, in worldview at least, with the notorious Moms for Liberty, which seems to be plummeting earthward after a brief ascent to political influence in Ron DeSantis’ Florida. MFL has been identified as “extremist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Doubtless VFA is too small to have attracted SPLC’s notice.

VFA touts itself as a parental rights group, fighting against government intrusion into parents’ “natural right to make decisions” about their children’s upbringing. Which sounds kind of benign on the surface, but their idea of government intrusion is pretty darn broad.

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Phil Scott’s Cunning Primary Day Plan

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It’s been years since Gov. Phil Scott has had to run a competitive race, and maybe his political team has gotten soft or something. Because when it comes to shooting oneself in the foot, it’s hard to top a Republican governor texting voters in Vermont’s most progressive Senate district on behalf of the centrist candidate. Who, spoiler alert, lost.

I mean, who’s in charge over there? Baldrick?

This wasn’t the governor’s only ill-considered stomp into Democratic primary turf. His team also sent texts on behalf of Elizabeth Brown, faux-Dem challenger to incumbents Tom Stevens and Theresa Wood. Both are committee chairs and influential members of the House Democratic caucus. Ya think they’ll remember this little misadventure with gratitude? Ya think the admin’s relationship with the Legislature just took a small but discernible turn for the worse?

My guess? Either Team Scott is just desperate to move the needle on legislative races or they’ve got too much time on their hands, what with a snoozer of a contest against Dem nominee Esther Charlestin their biggest “challenge.” Maybe they should just take the rest of the year off.

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One Neat Trick for Concealing the Reach of Your Political Donations (CORRECTION)

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Correction. I got a crucial detail wrong in this post. Donors do not file information. The donor info is gleaned from candidate filings. Misspellings and carelessness with donor names and addresses is their fault, not the donors’. The broader point remains, that the blizzard of typos makes it extremely difficult to track donor activity, but that’s not the result of their malfeasance, deliberate or otherwise. Also, my apologies for the delay in correcting; I’ve still got Covid and have precious little energy at all.

In what’s generally been an underwhelming primary season to date, one of the biggest developments has been the outpouring of support going from a bunch of Burlington-area business leaders to a relative handful of candidates. Look at the donor lists of the top earners and you see a bunch of the same guys (well, almost entirely guys) giving four-figure checks to the same people: Stewart Ledbetter, Scott Beck, Elizabeth Brown, John Rodgers, Pat Brennan, etc.

It would be highly instructive to track how much each of these minor tycoons is investing in political centrism and where they’re putting down their markers. And it’s almost impossible to do so, thanks to how the Secretary of State’s campaign finance portal processes donor reports and how the donors seem to be taking full advantage of a loophole on offer.

What’s happening is that donors submit reports with slightly different iterations of their names and addresses. When you search for donors, each report shows up as if it’s a separate person. For instance, if you search for “Lisman, B,” you get not one, but 30 separate matches. If you search for “Broughton, L,” you get 40.

Forty.

And most of them have few if any donations listed. If you want to find out how much Lenore Broughton has given to whom, you’ll have to open each and every one of those 40 in turn. It’s maddening.

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If a Seldom-Read Conservative “News” Site Falls in the Forest…

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It seems the megadonor with more dollars than sense, Lenore Broughton, has experienced a rare flash of insight. Late this afternoon, Broughton suddenly announced the end of True North Reports, the right-wing “news” website.

Broughton, who must be described as a “reclusive heiress” per the sacred rules of journalism, had been single-handedly bankrolling TNR for years. Did she get tired of handing our her money and getting bupkis in return? Is she moving into a new realm of estate planning? Could she — horrors! — be taking my advice and investing her fortune in projects that might promote the conservative movement in Vermont?

Who knows. She certainly won’t tell us. She never talks to the press, and reacts with anger when a photographer tries to take her picture. She ran TNR as a closed book; no contact information was listed on the site. TNR’s (expired) entry in the Secretary of State’s corporate registry cited Broughton as Registered Agent, included no other names, and listed her Burlington home as TNR’s address of record.

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Masking Is Becoming a Rarity, But Mask Panic Is Still a Thing

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Oh boy. Mark your calendars and get your popcorn ready. The anti-maskers are coming to Burlington!

Yeah, not sure what they’re so upset about. The city’s indoor mask mandate expired more than a year ago, and masking is rapidly becoming a fringe activity. I’m still being cautious, but I recently attended an indoor event and was the only person to wear a mask in an crowd of about 30.

But anyway, here it comes, “The Vermont Emergency Forum to Assess the Respiratory Hazards of Masks” on Friday, May 12 in the Contois Auditorium. You could probably guess who’s behind it, but I won’t keep you in suspense. The sponsors are the Vermont Institute for Human Flourishing, the nonprofit plaything of conservative megadonor Lenore Broughton and her new bestie, former VTGOP chair Deb Billado, and Vermont Stands Up, a wannabe statewide organization of the anti-mask, anti-vax crowd.

And then there’s the “facilitator” of the all-day event: “Dr.” Rob WIlliams, once best known for the Second Vermont Republic organization that was once kinda respectable on the left but turned out to be Confederate-adjacent at the very least, and now host of “V-TV,’ an online interview show that’s been booted from YouTube but can still be seen on Vimeo if you must.

Oh, and you’ll also get the chance to bump elbows with the Desautels Family, who’ll be getting a “BREATHING CHAMPIONS AWARD” (caps theirs). Paterfamilias Mike Desautels, you may recall, was stripped of his UPS Store franchise in 2021 for refusing to abide by the state’s indoor mask mandate.

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Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Win, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss

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Congratulations to Jarrod Sammis, newly elected member of the Vermont House in the Rutland-3 district…

… and the only one on my long list of far-right Republican candidates who didn’t lose.

For those keeping score, and you bet I am, that’s one win and 23 losses. Which kinda explains my previous post about how the Vermont Republican Party has led itself, with supreme confidence, deep into the political wilderness with no idea what to do next except Keep Striding Forward!

That 1-23 record wasn’t the only bad news for Team Extreme. They also lost a bunch of races featuring far-right candidates I never got around to covering. Remember that 16 of the 21 Republican Senate candidates were extremists? Well, 12 of them lost. They may have picked up one seat at best. In the House, where the Republican ticket had 42 in irregular earth orbit, 35 of them lost. And that included three incumbent representatives who won’t be coming back: Vicky Strong, Sally Achey, and VTGOP Vice Chair Samantha Lefebvre.

Instead of bulking up their ranks and possibly upending caucus leadership, the extremists actually lost ground. It was a thorough rebuke for ultraconservatism in Vermont.

But let’s start with their only bright spot, the guy with a YouTube channel full of inflammatory videos that revealed an unhealthy fascination with guns and a probably-controlled desire to train them on socialists and communists. The channel he quickly deleted when it became public knowledge, claiming he did so to [checks notes] protect his family’s privacy. Sammis eked out a two-point win in reliably conservative territory. Bully for him.

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Hey, Lenore Broughton Has Found Another Rathole to Throw Her Money Into

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Well, doesn’t that look impressive. A new “Institute” focused on the idea of Human Flourishing, a well-established principle in the humanities — and also in evangelical Christianity. Classically restrained logo and font. You might assume this is a broad-based serious enterprise… until you explore its website further.

Upon which you discover that (a) there’s not a heck of a lot of substance, just a few minimal pages with big pictures and not much text, and (b) the Institute’s two top officers are former VTGOP chair Deb Billado and Vermont’s Favorite Archconservative Moneybags, Lenore Broughton.

I’ll give you one guess who’s writing the checks for this outfit.

The Vermont Institute for Human Flourishing joins the likes of True North Reports and the late unlamented Vermonters First on the roster of no-hope organizations Broughton has funded in lieu of doing anything that might actually have an impact.

Well, to be fair, it’s too early to make that call on VIHF. It hasn’t had time to fail. Yet.

A brief explanation of “human flourishing.” In the social sciences slash humanities, it’s an interdisciplinary study of how best to help people reach their full potential. (Harvard has a Human Flourishing Program.) In evangelical Christian circles, it means channelling sexuality into traditional male/female marriage and battling deviant practices like homosexuality, extramarital sex, and pornography.

I think we know which camp the Vermont Institute is a member of.

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