Political Realignment in Vermont

In 1985, a Jewish refugee from Switzerland named Madeleine Kunin became the first female governor of Vermont. Kunin had served as Lt. Governor and a member of the Burlington legislature. As governor, she brought women into government in historic numbers and focused new attention on the needs of children and the environment. Under her watch, the sands of Vermont politics shifted forever. 

That system change is about to happen again. In the last three months, six of the Democratic majority in the Vermont Senate have either died or announced their retirements. Each was a stalwart of the old guard. 

Sadly, Senators Dick Mazza and Dick Sears have passed away. Dick Mazza “is probably the most effective legislator in my lifetime in politics,’’ former Governor Howard Dean told me last week. “A remarkable human being. If we had more people like that in politics, we would be far better off.’’

If you travel around Vermont, you are driving on roads paved and graded with money controlled by Senator Mazza. When you walk into schools and courthouses or see infrastructure like a sewer treatment plant, it is likely Mazza had a hand in paying for it with taxpayer dollars. 

If you are gay and want to get married, then Dick Sears played a major role in getting that law passed in 2009, not to mention a slew of criminal justice reforms. Sears designed the legalization of cannabis, too.

Add to these deaths the retirements of four senators - Jane Kitchel, Dick McCormack, Brian Campion, and Robert Starr - and former Governor Howard Dean's decision NOT to run for governor, and we have a Vermont Senate that is changing dramatically. These older politicians have recognized, in part, that a new generation is waiting in the wings. Many of them are already serving.

In November’s elections, this crop of young, impatient, sometimes more progressive, and modern-thinking legislators have decided to knock on the door of the White House and the political nursing home we call Congress. 

Don’t believe me? 

Well, the Vermont Democratic Party has decided not to send established figures like Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Instead, they are sending a group of very young delegates that includes a host of next-generation political activists. They include Weinberger’s top political advisor, Samantha Sheehan, CD Mattison, who ran for mayor of Burlington, and Natalie Silver, the campaign manager to Vermont Rep.

Older senators like Mazza, Sears, and Starr believed in a system that worked—it just had to be tweaked to work better. They focused on paving roads and running the government. The new generation still paves the roads, but they see fundamental flaws in the system. They believe the American system was designed by old white men for the benefit of old white men, and it needs to change. Child care, policing, criminal justice, taxes on the wealthy, school funding, and energy transformation are just a few of the issues they care about. To them, climate change is an existential threat to our existence and economy, whereas the old guard often treated it as a secondary policy issue. 

Many of these new-faced legislators are remaking the Vermont General Assembly, and a good number of them are graduates of Emerge-VT, a non-profit group that recruits and trains Democratic women to run for office. A new kind of political power elite is growing, and it’s coming from Emerge-VT’s “cabinet" of graduates and advisors. 

Emerge-VT’s cabinet includes campaign consultants, officeholders, funders, and activists. Emilie Kornheiser is now the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee and a leading voice on wealth taxes. Brenda Siegel is a former candidate for governor and the state’s leading activist on housing the homeless, and Brenda Churchill is a transgender activist and select board member. Sen. Ruth Hardy chairs the Senate Government Operations Committee. 

In the Kunin-Snelling-Dean era, governors leaned on Burlington power brokers in law and finance. Now, the Emerge-VT cabinet is creating a new kind of political network. And guess who founded Emerge-VT, the aforementioned Madeleine Kunin. 

Kunin may have changed Vermont with her election as governor in 1985, but her founding of Emerge-VT has arguably had a bigger impact by setting up another generational change. 

This younger generation is slated to do battle with the very last representative of the Kunin-Snelling-Dean era - current Governor Phil Scott, who learned the legislative ropes under Dick Mazza and Dick Sears and sat on Mazza’s two legislative committees and made sure to listen very closely. 

For Scott—and many previous governors of both parties—the leading issue for their reelection is the cost of living. He’s trying to keep Vermont affordable, and while he can be liberal on social issues, he must be conservative on taxes. 

This next generation—Rep. Korneiser and many others—say the wealthy are walking away with money that should go to schools and other needs. This is where the tension lies between the new and the old. How do you make Vermont resilient to climate change and pay for child care without raising taxes? Phil Scott believes the new generation is going too fast. They say he is going too slow. 

Scott has to sell the easier, simpler, and shorter argument and will likely win a fourth term. But the new generation knows they will still be here after the governor leaves office, and they will be ready. And when they take over, get ready for the very foundations of our government to be questioned and changed to fit an emerging culture that is very different from what came before. 

While the Biden generation is still hanging on, reality will soon set in, and Vermont—as usual—can be a model.