Sugaring Off: Vermont Politics and History, Plain and Simple

Well, the results of the 2024 election are in, and let’s just say things did not turn out how I expected they would. Intrepid readers will no doubt remember that last week, I predicted that the Vermont Democrats would narrowly hold their supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature even as Governor Phil Scott cruised to re-election. That did not happen. By my math, Democrats have lost 20 house seats and 6 senate seats, putting the balance in both chambers at 92-58 and 17-13, respectively. If I’m not mistaken, this is the largest shift in legislative balance since the infamous civil unions backlash of 2000, which cost the Democrats their House majority. Democrats will still hold the gavels in both chambers, but their ability to override Governor Scott’s vetoes is gone. Let’s dig into these results. (If there are typos or things that don’t make total sense I apologize, I’m running on about four hours of sleep).

Statewide Races

In a surprise to nobody, Governor Phil Scott steamrolled his Democratic challenger Esther Charlestin to clinch a fifth term in office. Scott won by his highest margin ever, cracking 70% of the vote to Charlestin’s 21%. Charlestin is the second Democratic nominee in a row to lose every town in the state. In what I can only assume is a reporting error on VTSOS’s website, Barre City appears to have given 75% of its vote to independent candidate Poa Mutino, I can only assume that Mutino’s numbers got switchfiggled with Scott’s. Interesting comparison, Scott did two points better than the Republican gubernatorial nominee in North Dakota and eight points better than the GOP nominee in West Virginia, both of which are much redder states than Vermont.

In a surprise to many (including yours truly), Lieutenant Governor David Zuckerman appears to have narrowly lost to Republican nominee John Rodgers. As of this morning, VTSOS has Zuckerman trailing Rodgers by a little less than 6000 votes. Neither candidate has won a majority so the General Assembly will have to pick a winner, but I expect the legislature will follow time-honored custom and award the victory to the candidate who won the greatest share of the popular vote. Rodgers is the first Republican not named Phil Scott to win a statewide race since 2010, when incumbent GOP Auditor Tom Salmon narrowly beat Doug Hoffer.

The other statewide races were also closer than expected. Not a single Democrat cracked 60% this year. AG Charity Clark defeated Ture Nelson 54-34, Treasurer Mike Pieciak beat Joshua Bechhoefer 56-36, and SOS Sarah Copeland Hanzas and Auditor Doug Hoffer only beat H. BROOKE PAIGE 55-37 and 55-36, respectively.

The Senate

Lots of big surprises in the green chamber yesterday. All four of the hotly contested battlegrounds (Chittenden-North, Grand Isle, Orleans, and Caledonia) went to the Republicans, as did Orange, a race where I thought the GOP had at best an outside shot, and one of two seats in Addison, a district that hasn’t elected a Republican since the 2000 civil unions backlash.

In Caledonia, the only seat I was sure would flip to the GOP, Rep. Scott Beck defeated Democrat Amanda Cochrane by 16 points to flip the seat held by retiring Sen. Jane Kitchel. In Orleans, where I was very bullish on Rep. Katherine Sims’s chances to hold onto Bobby Starr’s seat, GOP challenger Sam Douglass won by 18 points. In Chittenden-North, incumbent Sen. Irene Wrenner lost by 12 to Milton State Rep. Chris Mattos. In Grand Isle, appointed incumbent Andy Julow lost by 6 to Colchester Rep. Pat Brennan. This was the seat I was most confident that Democrats would be able to hold, but Brennan was able to net almost 600 votes out of his Malletts Bay-based house district and that provided him with his margin of victory.

The two big surprises on the Senate map were in Orange and Addison. In Orange County, perpetual incumbent Mark MacDonald has gone down to defeat against Larry Hart. MacDonald, who has cruised to re-election every cycle since 2000 (when he lost, again, in the civil unions backlash) and has served off and on in the Senate since 1996, lost by nearly 13 points. MacDonald lost pretty much everywhere in the district except the deep blue towns of the Upper Valley, and even there only Strafford gave him anything close to its usual margin.

In what’s probably the biggest upset in the Senate this year, Addison Senator Chris Bray, the chair of the Senate’s Environment and Natural Resources Committee, appears to have lost to Republican Steven Heffernan. Heffernan currently leads Bray by 667 votes with all of the district’s towns reporting. Bray was one of the chief architects of the Affordable Heat Act, which has been one of the pieces of legislation at the center of the GOP’s campaign against the Democratic supermajority.

The loss of three (or four, depending on how you look at things) incumbents plus Starr and Kitchel’s seats flipping and Rodgers winning the LG race will make the new Senate a very interesting one indeed. Rodgers will be one of three members of the Committee on Committees, which determines committee assignments, alongside Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth and a to-be-elected third member. There are many key committees now in need of new chairs, and I’ll probably do a more speculative article in the coming weeks looking at what the Senate might look like.

The House

There’s no way around it: Democrats took a shellacking in the House. By my tally, Democrats have lost 20 seats, including many incumbents, two members of leadership, and two committee chairs. For clarification, in this section I’ll refer to “District (Incumbent)” even if the incumbent didn’t seek re-election.

Orleans-3 (Templeman) and Addison-Rutland (Andriano) were auto-flips for the GOP because Democrats did not have a candidate. Of the remaining seats, I expected that Grand Isle-Chittenden (Leavitt), Rutland-Bennington (Chesnut-Tangerman), Bennington-Rutland (Rice), Caledonia-3 (Labounty), Caledonia-1 (Farlice-Rubio) Chittenden-23 (Andrews), Windsor-2 (Arrison), and Orange-1 (Demrow) could flip, but I didn’t expect all of them to go for the GOP and certainly not by such large margins.

Of the remaining seats, three were on my list of sleeper flips. Those were Washington-3 (Williams), Rutland-Windsor (Nicoll), and Caledonia-2 (Troiano). The ones that weren’t even on my radar were Caledonia-Washington (Pearl), Addison-3 (Lanpher), Rutland-7 (Notte), Rutland-9 (Jerome), Lamoille-2 (Carpenter), Windsor-Windham (Chase), and Franklin-3 (McCarthy). These were all seats that went *handily* for Dems in the last couple of cycles, and in some cases didn’t even have GOP candidates in 2022. Especially of note here are Rep. Diane Lanpher, the chair of House Appropriations, and Reps. Will Notte and Mike McCarthy, both of whom are senior members of Democratic leadership. McCarthy is also the chair of House Government Operations.

There were two bright spots for the Dems in the House: in Chittenden-19, Wendy Critchlow defeated Republican Leland Gazo to flip Pat Brennan’s open house seat, and in Bennington-1, Jonathan Cooper fended off Bruce Busa to narrowly hold a seat that Dems almost lost in 2022.

This makes the calculus of Rep. Laura Sibilia’s independent bid for the Speakership much more interesting. The Republican caucus just got a whole lot bigger, meaning they could play a key role in the coming contest, and if I were a Democratic backbencher (especially one of the few frontliners who survived), I would be looking for major changes in leadership at the top. If I were Speaker Krowinski, I’d be looking over my shoulder, especially with two top members of my whip team not returning. As friend of the page Connor Daley observed on Twitter (formerly X), Sibilia’s challenge to Krowinski now looks rather prescient.

What happens now?

Short answer: I haven’t the slightest idea. In large part, it depends Governor Scott. If he wants to try to advance legislative priorities of his own this session rather than continuing to stand athwart the Democrats yelling “stop,” I think he has a mandate to do that. Certainly education finance reform will be top of mind for everyone this session, it’s just a question of whether the Governor’s office or legislative leadership will be driving the bus (the school bus, if you will). It will also be interesting to see what happens to the relationship between the Governor and leadership. Certainly if Rep. Krowinski remains as Speaker I doubt we’ll see detente between the Pavilion and the Cafeteria anytime soon. I am planning to be on the ground in Montpelier to provide some live coverage of the first week of the legislative session, so stay tuned for that!

In closing, I’d like to say a word of thanks to everyone else who ran for office or helped out on campaigns this cycle. This work isn’t easy, and I know that tensions were high during this campaign, but I believe very strongly that every one of us cares deeply about Vermont and wants us to move forward in the right direction. Fingers crossed for a legislative session full of intelligent, reasoned debate about what that direction might be!

I’ll be working on some deeper analysis of these races and what the underlying cause of this localized red wave might be (and getting to work on maps again), but I’m planning to take the rest of today off to go outside and breathe the fresh air. I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but it’ll bear watching closely. Or, as President Obama might have put it (in a slightly earthier way), “this sh*t would be really interesting if we weren’t in the middle of it.” Whatever happens, though, you can always count on a partially informed and occasionally interesting take on it here on Sugaring Off!

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