The last pre-election round of campaign finance reports is in, not that anyone in the media noticed. To me, the single biggest note is that the Barons of Burlington and their allies are continuing to throw big money at John Rodgers, Republican candidate for lieutenant governor and alleged rural populist. In the first half of October, Rodgers raised $20,250; in the second half, he took in an extraordinary $69,259, almost erasing the cash advantage held by incumbent Prog/Dem David Zuckerman throughout the campaign. Not quite, but almost.
Of that $69,259, a full $58,199 was in increments of $1,000 or more.
That’s more than 83% of Rodgers’ total takings between October 16 and 31.
Son of the soil, my Aunt Fanny.
Here’s another way to slice the bologna. During the period, Rodgers took in a scant $2,560 in gifts of $100 or less. That’s a mere 3.7% of his total.
Which is S.O.P. for Rodgers’ campaign as a whole. He’s raised $212,443 so far, but only $8,809 in gifts of $100 or less. That’s only 4.1% of his total.
After months of inaction that led to a mass unsheltering of close to 1,500 vulnerable Vermonters, the Scott administration today took a step toward addressing the crisis. A step so insultingly small that the governor might as well have slapped a homeless person across the face.
The administration opened two shelters with space for 17 families. That’s 17 out of close to 1,000 unsheltered since mid-September, when new caps on state-paid motel vouchers took effect. For those unprepared for a bit of higher math, that works out to 1.7% of the need. Want another appalling statistic or two? According to the state, 343 children have been unsheltered since mid-September. These shelters will house maybe a couple dozen or so kids. The rest can go hang.
Actually, as of the orchestrated press tour on Friday morning, only one shelter (in WIlliston) had opened for business. Hasty preparations were still underway at the Waterbury Armory and reporters were not allowed to enter, according to VTDigger. The Waterbury space reportedly features partitioned areas for families, with the partitions not reaching the ceiling. The Williston facility looked a bit more inviting.
Aww, look at that admiring gaze. You’d never guess that these two people are on opposite sides of a campaign in its closing stage.
Seriously, it’s bad enough anytime when top Democrats share a platform with Republican Gov. Phil Scott. But one week before Election Day? After months and months of the governor shitting on the Democrats every time he gets a chance?
Look, I realize this was one of those sicky-sweet “We Vermonters Are Special” events in which Our Leaders pay homage to our most cherished myths about ourselves. But did anyone give a thought to the political implications of this? I mean, you can be a True Vermonter and still believe that your party is better than the other one. You can still act like your party might be seriously trying to defeat the person you chose to favor with an admiring gaze.
For those tuning in late, Democratic Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas held a joint press conference Tuesday with Republican Gov. Phil Scott to talk about election security and the importance of civility in our politics. Great, fine, I agree. Civility is a good thing, and it’s nice anytime any Republican deigns to acknowledge the integrity of our electoral system. But let’s not pretend this isn’t a serious contest in which the other guy is trying to beat the pants off you. Because he is.
Seeing this made me wonder, has Copeland Hanzas ever made an appearance with her party’s actual nominee, Esther Charlestin? And I don’t mean sharing a stage with the entire ticket at the state party convention. I mean an event where you say nice things about her and make a public show of support. Maybe she has, I don’t know. But there’s been damn little from the VDP’s most prominent members, even by their dismal standards of giving lip service to their party’s gubernatorial nominees.
Update. I’ve been told that Copeland Hanzas has, indeed, done her share of campaigning with Charlestin — or perhaps even more. Good on her. I still think it’s unseemly to validate Scott’s image so close to Election Day.
In fact, Copeland Hanzas may have given more aid and comfort to Phil Scott at yesterday’s event than she’s provided for Charlestin through the length of the campaign. The presser got widespread positive coverage in our print, digital and electronic media — definitely more coverage than any event in Charlestin’s campaign. And it underscored Scott’s selling point to non-Republican voters: that he’s an acceptable choice for governor even if he plays for the other team.
It’s almost as if Copeland Hanzas is one of those Democrats who’s biding their time until Scott leaves the stage and wants to be at the front of the line for her party’s nomination the next time she thinks it’s a prize worth possessing. It’s almost as if Copeland Hanzas wants to maintain some kind of relationship with Scott, even as he routinely trashes everyone else in her party — and largely ignores his actual opponent in the race.
It’s almost as if her own political future is more important than her party’s.
That’s harsh, but really now. In taking part in that joint presser, Copeland Hanzas was basically saying “It’s okay to vote for Phil Scott because NICE GUY” when he’s spent the whole campaign showing that He. Is. Not. A. Nice. Guy.
Coincidentally, several hours after the presser, VTDigger published a profile of the governor in which he acknowledged that things are not better in Vermont than they were when he took office — and heaped all the blame on legislative Democrats and the laws they’ve enacted over his vetoes. “After the last two years, the answer is no. We’re moving in the wrong direction,” he said.
So what he’s saying is that Vermont was better off during the pandemic than it is now, and it’s all because of those damn Democrats. That’s the Phil Scott definition of civility, of showing respect to your opposition. And Sarah Copeland Hanzas just took a big ol’ scrubby and did her best to whitewash that guy’s political reputation.
In the closing weeks of a campaign, candidates and other political actors are required to report mass media expenditures of $500 or more to the Secretary of State within 48 hours. This is designed to publicly expose any large-scale floods of money in a campaign’s closing days. Of course, this depends on somebody in the press paying attention to mass media filings, and so far nobody has. Well, nobody but Your Obedient Serpent.
The most interesting note from recent filings is that Gov. Phil Scott and his ticketmate, Republican LG nominee John Rodgers, filed a total of 17 separate mass media reports on a single day, Monday October 28. Fourteen of them reported major buys of radio ad time, all conducted jointly and with the expenses split evenly between the two campaigns. Two others reported a joint $4,390 TV buy carried out by the Vermont production firm Hen House Media. The 17th filing reported a $2,740 Scott-only TV buy through Hen House which, pardon the pun, is chicken feed for a gubernatorial campaign.
The other 14 reports add up to $36,855 spent on commercial radio. The big winner was VOX AM-FM, which sold an impressive $11,460 in Scott/Rodgers spots on its Burlington-area stations. The rest: $8,000 to the Radio Vermont Group (primarily WDEV), $6,000 to Rutland-based Catamount Radio (105.3 Cat Country, Z97.1 et al), $5,000 to Great Eastern Radio (Frank, Froggy, and the Penguin), $1,006 to Yankee Kingdom Media of Wells River, and $1,000 to Sugar River Radio.
A couple of notes. First, and it pains me to say this as a longtime radio voice, but the medium is dying. I’m old and I worked for decades in radio, and if I don’t listen anymore, then who does? (The only radio I regularly consume is content made available in podcast form.) So why are Scott and Rodgers going so big into radio for their big closing push? It’s a media strategy from a generation ago.
Second, why wait until now? All those ads are going to clutter the airwaves and severely test the patience of those who still listen. Why not start the ads a couple weeks ago?
Third, why is Scott making such an effort to boost Rodgers when the stakes are so much higher in the Legislature?
Sen. Chris Bray seems to have contracted a mild case of the fantods regarding his prospects for re-election to a [checks notes] seventh term in office. He’s raised quite a bit of money, and he’s spent even more than he’s raised. Before the August primary, he and fellow Addison County Sen. Ruth Hardy spent big against a challenge from Rep. Caleb Elder that, frankly, was doomed from the start. As I said in my previous post, incumbent senators just don’t lose unless they’ve committed gross malfeasance, aged beyond the electorate’s tolerance, or done something equivalently heinous.
And now, Bray is spending beyond his means against a surprisingly well-funded challenge from Republican Steven Heffernan (and a not-nearly-so-well-funded challenge from Republican Landel Cochran). And I get it; in his position, he shouldn’t be taking anything for granted. But I’m here to tell you that Bray ain’t losing. Heffernan’s odds are roughly equivalent to a snowball in a very hot place.
Look. Besides the fact that incumbent senators never lose, there’s the district. It’s been a full generation since Addison sent a Republican to the senior chamber: Tom Bahre in 2000, the year of the great civil unions backlash. Since then, two Democrats every two years for a grand total of 22 elected Dems to zero Republicans. In 2022, Bray and seatmate Ruth Hardy each received more than 33% of the vote, while third-place Republican Lloyd Dike lagged with 16.4%. Republicans have routinely finished far out of the running in Addison, except for those years when the GOP didn’t even bother to field candidates.
Yes, Heffernan is a more credible figure than Dike, one of the radical right hopefuls who co-signed a 2022 newspaper ad denying that global warming exists and asserting that greenhouse gases are actually good for us and the planet. Heffernan isn’t one o’ them. But he’s not winning, either. Not in Addison, not in a Senate race against two established Democratic incumbents.
Well, it’s not literally last call, but in practical terms it’s pretty damn late. Thanks to universally accessible mail-in voting, the longer a candidate waits to spend money, the less impactful it will be. As a result, some candidates (whose fundraising perhaps outpaced expectations) seem to be shoveling money out the door as quickly as they can.
First, a note about the calendar. In the home stretch of a campaign, the deadlines come thick and fast. Candidates are required to file on October 1, October 15, and November 1. Also, in the 45 days before an election they’re required to report any mass media expenditures of $500 or more within 24 hours. The rationale, I believe, is to provide as much clarity as possible about late-stage campaign activity. The problem is, gaining clarity would require (a) each voter diligently poring over the reports, or (b) robust media coverage of campaign spending. The former is an impossible ask, and the latter is largely a thing of the past given the tremendously reduced ranks of our political press corps.
Anyway. There’s little earthshaking in the new reports; they only cover two weeks. But there are some items worthy of note, and here they are.
Alleged “nice guy” Gov. Phil Scott has done more than his share of garbagey things. The constant belittling of the Legislature, the persistent passive-aggressiveness, the blame-shifting and refusal to take responsibility for anything that happens, the stubborn adherence to policies that don’t work even as problems continue to worsen, just off the top of my head. But I don’t know if anything tops — bottoms? — what his administration did on Wednesday about the state’s deliberate mass unsheltering of vulnerable Vermonters.
What it did — well, what it actually did was nothing whatsoever. What it hinted that it was planning to do, in off-the-record leaks to Vermont’s two biggest TV news operations, is set up “at least two shelters for families, with a projected completion date of Nov. 1″ according to WPTZ, which reported that the shelters would accommodate “11 families, including 21 children.” (WCAX reported that “three new shelters for homeless families” were in the works.)
This is just despicable on a number of levels. First, it’s so inadequate that it’s practically an insult. Hundreds of households, totaling at least 1,500 vulnerable people, have been unsheltered since mid-September, and the state’s plan is to provide for about 30 of them?
Second, WCAX reported that state officials are “aware of”… “at least 21” children left unsheltered. That’s bullshit. There are far more children than that who’ve been affected by new limits on the GA housing program. And they know it. (They admitted it this morning. See below.)
One month later, nothing much has changed. Except that the humanitarian crisis then foreseen by advocates for the homeless has become a reality that ought to scar our consciences and lay to rest any claim we have to moral superiority, to the comfortable myth of Vermont as a better, more caring place.
It was on September 15 that a group of advocates gathered in the Statehouse to sound the alarm about the completely predictable unsheltering of close to 2,000 vulnerable Vermonters due to new limits on the GA emergency housing program. They gathered again on October 15 to sound the alarm yet again, as the unsheltering has proceeded apace and state leaders have refused to lift a finger to stop it.
“We are working frantically to keep people from dying,” said Julie Bond of Good Samaritan haven (pictured above, with former Brattleboro town manager Peter Elwell and Frank Knaack of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont looking on). “The situation is impossible, it is immoral, and it is untenable.”
The coverage of this year’s Vermont elections — including, often, my own — generally ignores one factor that will outweigh any of the issues or trends we explore ad nauseam. This includes (1) the much-anticipated tax revolt, which may or may not be a reality, (2) the Barons of Burlington’s plot to kill the state Senate supermajority, and (3) the Democrats’ failure to mount a serious challenge to Gov. Phil Scott. Or anything else you could name.
I refer to the national election. The race for president and the battle for Congressional majorities. This cannot be ignored in any assessment of Vermont’s elections.
There is always a substantial jump in turnout between a midterm election and the ensuing presidential. Since 1994, the smallest jump was between 1994 and 1996, with a 16.7% increase. The biggest was between 2012 and 2014, with a 38.8% increase. The average midterm:presidential increase in that period was 24.1%.
Not all cycles are created equal. 2012:2014 was an outlier on each end, with high turnout for Barack Obama’s re-election followed by 2014’s plunge due to a lackluster gubernatorial contest between mortally wounded incumbent Peter Shumlin and dismally bland challenger Scott Milne.
(Brief digression. The 2014 election was the outlier of all outliers, as Shumlin suffered a catastrophic drop in support.. He’d won 170,749 votes in 2012 — and only 89,509 in 2014. Milne, who very nearly beat Shumlin, actually drew 24,000 FEWER votes in 2014 than losing Republican Randy Brock had in 2012.)
But while not all cycles are created equal, there’s a clear and obvious pattern. A lot more Vermonters go to the polls when the presidency is at stake than when it’s not.
Joe Gervais has returned to the political stage. The extremely unsuccessful 2022 Republican candidate for a House seat in and around Manchester is now running for state Senate in Bennington County. Two years ago in this space, I covered the extreme views ineptly concealed behind a façade of common sense conservatism, such as election denialism, Covid conspiratorialism, and belief in the thoroughly debunked canard that vaccines cause autism.
But that was a mere appetizer for the main course we have on today’s menu. Gervais is once again running as a fiscally conservative Republican of the kind that would make Phil Scott proud… but he made the cardinal mistake of revealing his true self in a blog on Substack called “Vermont Musings.”
And boy, are his views ever extreme. Among the most extreme I’ve seen in Vermont politics, and that includes the likes of Art Peterson, Gregory Thayer, and John Klar.
Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
The Vermont Political Observer. 