Some people just loooooove the taste of sour grapes. Myself, I prefer to let them ripen before consuming, but Molly Gray and some of her devotees simply can’t help themselves. They’re shoveling fistfuls of the bitter things into their mouths like they’re consuming caviar.

And what’s left of Vermont’s political media is feeding this strange hunger by obsessing over the tide of big, out-of-state money spent on behalf of Becca Balint’s Congressional campaign. Seriously, they’ve missed a boatload of good stories about the primary, but they’re chasing this one like a starving dog sniffin’ roadkill.

So let’s start here. No, the last-minute flood of independent money didn’t make the difference. There is no way on God’s green earth that the outside expenditures created a 24 PERCENTAGE POINT MARGIN OF VICTORY. I’m sure they contributed a few points to the margin, but Balint would have won handily without a single outside dime.

She beat Gray fair and square. The longer Gray and her minions keep beating this drum, the longer it will take to rehabilitate her political reputation in Democratic circles. She’s already at serious risk of never eating lunch in this town again.

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Another round of Congressional campaign finance filings are in, and the headline is that Lt. Gov. Molly Gray leads the money race. And she does, but not by a meaningful margin, not enough to sway the primary… and Senate President Pro Tem Becca Balint is catching up. (I’ll try to come back to the numbers in the near future, but that’s all you need to know for now.)

Plus, she’s got the LGBTQ Victory Fund PAC spending six figures on her behalf. As is her custom, Gray is slamming Balint for, um, I guess, not preventing this independent actor from acting independently on her behalf? Because Balint is legally barred from any kind of interaction or coordination with Super PACs.

Well, it’s all bullshit anyway, and disastrously-timed bulllshit at that. Really? When the LGBTQ+ community is under attack, you want the community to unilaterally disarm? You want Balint to condemn an LGBTQ+ fund from promoting LGBTQ+ representation?

Gray says her beef isn’t with this group; it’s with any outside spending: “Vermonters decide who represents Vermonters, and no one else,” she says. But she’s happily accepting big fat checks from D.C. lobbyists, isn’t she? Yes, she is.

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