Sugaring Off: Vermont Politics and History, Plain and Simple

The Queen City, which usually provides political junkies with some of Town Meeting Day’s spiciest elections, is gearing up to serve us a real snoozer – with one exception. Burlington’s only contested City Council race will be in Ward 8, which covers most of UVM’s campus and a slice of Downtown between Pearl Street, Maple Street, and South Winooski Avenue (“SoWin,” if you’re hip and with it).

Ward 8 could be worthily dubbed “The Bloody Eighth” (after the notoriously swingy Indiana congressional district of the same number in the 1980s and 90s). Since its creation in 2015, only one councilor has been elected to more than one term from the seat.

That lucky two-term winner, former BTV Dems chair Adam Roof, was then defeated for re-election to a third term by Progressive Jane Stromberg, who then left the seat after one term to fellow Prog Ali House, who then resigned and was replaced in a hotly contested special election by Democrat Hannah King, who lost to the now-incumbent Prog Marek Broderick in 2024.

This ward is unique territory. Broderick beat King by about fifteen points, but that margin was only about 120 votes. Because Ward 8 has an extremely high student population, turnout is consistently much lower than in the rest of the city’s wards, even though all eight wards have approximately equal population (on paper). Last year, the Progs’ candidate for the East District City Council seat, Kathy Olwell, narrowly won Ward 8 even as she lost neighboring Ward 1 and the election to Democrat Allie Schachter.

The conventional wisdom for contests in this ward is that the Progressives try hard to juice student turnout while Democrats aim to turn out the “townie” vote of homeowners. Broderick, as a student and longtime organizer and activist with the DSA, may be better positioned to get out the student vote than Olwell was.

Broderick’s Democratic opponent will be Ryan Nick, a realtor who serves as a Burlington Justice of the Peace. Nick is employed by J.L. Davis Realty, a firm run by his father, Jeff Nick, who owns, among other properties, Burlington’s Courthouse Plaza building and South Burlington’s Blue Mall.

Nick Junior previously ran for City Council in the Prog bastion of Ward 2 in 2020, losing by 39 points to Council President and future mayoral candidate Max Tracy. An amusing sidebar, Nick’s campaign website from that election now redirects to the Wikipedia entry for Rene Magritte’s painting The Son of Man (you know, the one of a guy in a bowler hat with an apple in front of his face).

During that campaign, Nick raised $4,897 and spent $5,160 (which is some interesting mathematical jiujitsu considering he didn’t have any previous campaign dollars to roll over to make up that delta, as far as I’m aware). Among Nick’s top contributors in that campaign were real estate magnate Ernie Pomerleau, restaurateur Tim Halvorson, and former Democratic councilor Joan Shannon.

In 2024, Broderick raised $5,983 and spent $5,198. His top donors included the Champlain Valley Democratic Socialists and the Young Democratic Socialists of America, the environmental group Run on Climate, and socialist activists Adam Franz and Brett Yates.

Since this is the only contested race in the city this year, I’m expecting that both Nick and Broderick will vastly exceed their previous totals. If I had to predict which candidate will have a cash advantage, I’d lean towards Nick since Burlington Democrats tend to have deeper-pocketed donors than their Prog adversaries.

However, money isn’t everything, especially in a ward with such low turnout. The candidates’ ground game will be what decides this election, and in that regard I think Nick might be held back by his late entry into the race – the election is just two months away and Broderick and his team have been in the field knocking doors since mid November. Still plenty of time for him to make up that gap, but this race’s Vibes-Based Forecast™ rating starts at Leans Progressive.

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