Last night, my wife and I had a two or three minute conversation about the candidates in today’s Vermont Democratic Primary. I was woefully uninformed, and before going to bed, she gave me a homework assignment to get more informed and to write about it.
I worked from about midnight until 3:30 in the morning, keeping diligent notes as I researched and writing out my rational for why I was voting for each candidate. I only got so far as the statewide offices, but here’s what I came up with.
The Who’s This What Now?
First: why should we even care who is on the ballot?
If someone votes in the Democratic primary, the chances of them not voting for the Democrat in November, regardless of the candidate, are essentially null. So, from an individual’s perspective, why even bother with the primary part? Why not just stay home, keep living our lives, and let other Democrats decide who the candidate should be?
Well, I’m not sure you’ve heard, but the Democratic party is in the middle of an internal battle right now. One side in that battle seems to prefer corporate-backed American centrism that maintains an economic status quo that benefits the richest people in New York and California while offering sops to the poor and middle class (as if the latter even existed anymore).
The other side seems to be powered by people who actually come from the poor and middle class: bartenders and union workers, first- and second-generation immigrants, male and female soldiers, transgender pioneers, etc. These are real, actual people who know what it feels like to struggle with the most basic elements of life. The people who actually are part of the 99%.
For some of the people in this battle, it’s a fight to the death. Healthcare, literally, depends on it. Income, literally, depends on it. Education, literally, depends on it. And so on.
While it’s true that most Democrats will vote for whatever Democrats are on the ballot in November, today is the day when we decide which kind of Democrat our candidates are going to be. Are they going to be for slow, almost imperceptible improvements to the status quo, or are they going to stand up and be counted as your proxy vote for real change?
Vermont’s Democratic Candidates for the National Stage
For Vermont’s national representatives, we have two candidates running for U.S. Senate and three candidates running for the U.S. House.
The incumbents, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Peter Welch, are on the ballot, and I suspect they will each win in a landslide.
U.S. Senator
Senator Sanders is considered by most of the party faithful to be an honorable and well-intentioned individual who is highly informed on a number of issues and incredibly sympathetic to the needs of the poor and middle class. He’s so well loved by so many people that, even at his advanced age, some still see him in him the future of their party.
Folsade Adeluola
His challenger is Folsade Adeluola. She is 55 years old, and she’s lived in Vermont for less than a year. A single mother of a special needs child, she is a self-described activist of Nigerian heritage who promises to serve as Vermont’s Senator for one term and one term only.
She differs from Senator Sanders in a number of ways, if only by virtue of her birth, but their differences don’t amount to much when it comes to their policy preferences. The biggest difference is that Adeluola doesn’t want to run for President in 2020, so she won’t waste her time thinking about the needs of the other states. She says she’ll work for Vermonters, and only for Vermonters.
It’s an interesting point, but the U.S. Senate is a national body and not a state one, and I want my representative to have a real voice in national conversations. Senator Sanders has that voice right now, and it will only get amplified the closer we get to 2020. Sen. Sanders represents my views closely enough for me to treasure his committment to his principles. His long and honorable experience as a government official also earns him my vote.
U.S. Representative
Representative Peter Welch is the incumbent, but I’m not voting for him. Instead, I’m voting for Ben Mitchell.
I’m voting for Ben Mitchell because he received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Goddard College and he now teaches at Landmark College, which is a college for students with learning disabilities…you know, like the high school where I teach and like the exact degree I have from the exact college I went to? Yeah. I don’t know shit else about him, but Ben Martin has my vote.
We Goddardites need to stick together. Our alumni outreach isn’t as influential as Harvard’s, so if the least I can do is vote for my Goddard brothers and sisters on the ballot, then that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
Did I mention that Ben Martin is a member of the Socialist Party and the Liberty Uion party? I long ago published that I’m a communist sympathizer, so I’m down with the Socialist Party thing.
The Liberty Union Party is the one that, in 1971, nominated Bernie Sanders to be its very first candidate on the political stage and the one he was chair of when he resigned from it and became an independent in 1979, not because he disagreed with the party but because not enough people were showing up to the meetings (Bernie Sanders threw a party, and no one showed up; so the fucker went rogue).
And did I mention that Ben Martin is also a guitarist and he helped organize “Poets Against The War” in 2003, both of which probably put him on the right side of just about everything I care about?
Yeah. I’m voting for this guy.
Too bad he’s not a woman because the U.S. House of Representatives needs more of those.
Vermont’s Statewide Candidates
With the national candidates taken care, let’s look to the statewide offices. In Vermont, we vote for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, State Treasurer, and State Auditor.
Governor
The Democratic candidates for Governor (none of whom earned the nomination of my own Progresive Party) are James Ehlers, Christine Hallquist, Brenda Siegel, and Ethan Sonneborn.
James Ehlers seems to be a little bit of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. While calling himself a progressive now, he was once described in a local newspaper as “a well-known conservative” and shared articles on social media critical of Planned Parenthood.
He argues that he’s an agitator who will ask hard questions of both allies and opponents, such as the questions he asked in 2002 in an Op-Ed about why his interests as an angry white man were not represented on the political stage.
Yeah, I’m not voting for this dude.
Christine Hallquist, on the other hand, is vying to become the nation’s first openly transgender governor, after becoming the nation’s first openly transgender gubernatorial candidate. She has only been openly living as a woman since 2015, when “she began wearing a wig and a blouse to work, publicly coming out as a woman named Christine to her employees at the Vermont Electric Coop, the utility she had led for years as a man named Dave.”
This tells us she’s brave, and that she’s smart enough to lead several employees at a statewide utility co-op. The way she’s running her campaign shows us that she’s also smart enough to gain financial donations from the country’s politically connected transgender community, all of whom are angling to see one of their own elected to a major office, a governor of one of the fifty states.
Here’s why I am probably voting for her: because I have (too slowly) come to realize that transgender teenagers are among some of the most suffering individuals in our communities, that more than 40% of transgender individuals report having attempted suicide, and that transgender women are significantly more likely to be murdered than their cis peers. As a teacher, I have seen with my own eyes the physical, emotional, and spiritual turmoil that transgender individuals can suffer.
If any community needs a national win right now, it’s theirs.
Personally, I want the transgender teenagers I work with every day to see a possible future for themselves, a place where they are not only recognized and accepted by the wider community, but elected to serve as its leader and representative.
I also like that, according to Politico, “During her time at the helm [of Vermont Electric Coop], she steered the utility from the brink of financial ruin and increased the share of its energy coming from carbon-free sources while limiting rate hikes.”
Economically, she’s focused on the infrastructure behind Vermont’s access to today’s most vital resource: the Internet. She would like to “connect every home and business in Vermont with fiber optic cable utilizing proven rural cooperative models.”
On other issues, she’s definitely still learning how to talk to the media. She’s for “regulating guns like we regulate automobiles,” she told Politico, “but I really don’t want to talk about it.”
She also thinks Bernie’s economic platform wouldn’t work on a statewide scale, telling Politico, “I don’t think it works from a governor’s standpoint.”
To me, this latter remark maybe puts her a little closer to the “centrist” side of the battle for the Democratic party, as does her desire to see Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden stump for her in the general election, but to be honest, I think I’m in this one for my students.
The other two candidates are destined to go down as my “also rans.” The first is a 14-year-old boy. You can read about him on CBS News.
The second, Brenda Siegel, describes herself as “a low-income single mom” who “lost all of [her] belongings” during Tropical Storm Irene. She works as “the Executive Director and founder of the Southern Vermont Dance Festival,” which was founded to create economic activity in the wake of Irene. She’s also “an educator and anti-poverty activist.” She has been elected to several committees and “has long been heavily involved in politics and activist work, locally, statewide, and nationally.”
Her major focus is the economy, which she believes requires an increase in tourism. She wants people from around the country and around the world to come to Vermont and “be inspired to shop, eat, stay and visit throughout the year.”
She writes that we need to “re-think our outdated beliefs about what makes a thriving economy.” She wants an economy that works from the bottom up, concerning herself more with Vermont’s small businesses than with its big businessmen.
With a small business economy like Vermont already has, she believes the focus needs to be on driving new customers in the door, and the best way to do that is to make our consumer base bigger than the state’s population. We need, as an economy, to drive tourism.
She also has personal experience with the opiod epidemic, having lost a nephew to a heroin overdose, and the state’s education issues, having taught at all levels of the system.
She sounds as if she might have some actual experience when it comes to sitting down at a table to get things done, but I’m not sure I want my governor’s greatest professional accomplishment to be organizing a dance festival in Brattleboro. I’m sure she’s a nice person, but I have friends who organize events like that, and I wouldn’t want them to be my state’s chief executive officer.
Lieutenant Governor
Simple. I’m voting for David Zuckerman in November, so I don’t give a shit who the Democrats are. Zuckerman is the leading member of my official party, the Vermont Progressive Party, and he has my unqualified support for his candidacy.
I don’t know a whole lot about him, but I trust my Progressive brethren who nominated him.
Attorney General
The Democratic candidate for Attorney General, T.J. Donovan, is running unopposed in the primary. He is our current Attorney General.
Donovan has been an Assistant District Attorney, a Deputy State’s Attorney, and State’s Attorney, and now he’s our Attorney General. Seems like a reasonable path.
I think I’ll support him against his nonexisting opponent.
Secretary of State
The Democratic candidate for Secretary of State, Jim Condos, is also running unopposed in the primary, and he’s also the incumbent, having served as our Secretary of State since 2011. He’s basically the guy in charge of all of the information: how does it get filed, who does it get routed to, who has access to it, and how can they find it?
You want to start a business in Vermont? He’s your guy for finding out fees, filling out applications, and getting good, reliable information about how to do it “for real.”
You want a trademark? That’s him too. Gotta look up a regulation? Research something in the state’s archives? Set up a public election for your town? That’s what your Secretary of State helps you do.
I gotta tell you, as a curious individual, a teacher, and the writer of an experimental novel that speculates about how an independent Vermont could one day be governed, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on state-run websites, accessing all kinds of information and researching all kinds of intricacies of the system, and I gotta say: I’ve been impressed with how transparent everything has been, how neutrally worded and neutrally presented, almost as if there were invisible tunnel between me and the information I needed.
If that’s not the work of a successful Secretary of State, then I don’t what is. Jim Condos might be running unopposed, but I think he’s actually earned my vote.
State Treasurer
Another Democratic incumbent, Elizabeth Pearce, is running unopposed on the primary ballot. She’s worked in government finance for over 30 years, opposes Governor Scott’s proposal to set up a lease-to-own arrangement with a private prison company to build a new state prison and psychiatric care facility, supports immediate action when it comes to protecting the state’s water, and serves as the 2018 President of the National Association of State Treasurers (in other words, when it comes to all of the other state’s treasurers, they elected her to lead them). Sounds like a reasonable persons to vote for.
State Auditor
Again, the incumbent, Dan Hoffer, is running unopposed in the Democratic Primary. He first moved to Burlington in 1988 to take a position in Vermont’s Community & Economic Development Office under then-Mayor Bernie Sanders. He entered the private sector in 1993, where he remained until his election as State Auditor in 2012.
He’s looking to improve transparency around the budget and performance reports, strengthen the state’s whisteblower protections, enforce mandatory bidding processes for state contracts, and strengthening the screening process for businesses who benefit from the state’s workforce education grant program.
Sure. Why not?
Don’t Forget to Vote
There are local and county offices up for grabs as well, but the audience for those are too narrow for me to get into here. Suffice to say, I live in a Republican-leaning town in a Republican-heavy county, and there’s not enough progressive women, progressive people of color, or progressive young people on my local ballot.
If we really want change, then we have to change the identity of the people sitting at the table.
Provided, of course, that Bernie, a white Jewish man in his seventies who has earned my loyalty and trust, is sitting at the head of that table.
Now go vote!