Franklin County Republicans rode a wave of support that swept more of them into the Statehouse than in any election in recent memory.
Only two Democrats weathered the storm, which almost took down the man at the top of their ticket.
State Sen.-Elect Dustin Degree of St. Albans. Courtesy photo
“Vermont Republicans have worked against some heavy winds, but that’s changing. I think the winds are at our back now,” said former Rep. Dustin Degree, 29, of St. Albans, who won a Senate seat representing Franklin County on his second crack at it.
So what made the difference this time?
A record low turnout, which favored Republicans, was one factor. There was also $370,000 in outside PAC money that supported Republican challengers across the state. And county Republicans outspent their opponents even without the PAC support.
The money came from the Republican State Leadership Committee, a Washington, D.C., political action group that supports Republicans running for Statehouse seats. The RSLC spent money on behalf of all but one Republican who picked up a seat Tuesday. The PAC also advertised on behalf of some candidates who lost.
“I think it would be hard to argue that it didn’t make a difference, but we didn’t know it was coming and we weren’t counting on it,” said Brent Burns, 31, a Republican strategist who left Scott Milne’s campaign to focus on “15 to 30” legislative races.
The right time, the right message
Burns and other Republicans say having the right message for the moment and communicating it effectively were just as important.
That message was that state government had failed to address an “affordability crisis.” That phrase was the centerpiece of Republican campaigns focused on rising property taxes and stagnant property values and wages.
The concept reverberated in St. Johnsbury, Rutland and Franklin Counties, and elsewhere. Overall, Republicans are likely to pick up nine seats in the House and two in the Senate.
They’re still very much in the minority, but as Degree said, it’s the first time in a long time that Vermont Republicans — who were largely left out of the 2010 national Republican sweep — have gained ground in the Statehouse.
A salient moment in the campaign came in mid-October, Degree said, when House Democrats tried — too late — to assume the mantle of property tax reform.
Youth movement
There is a new energy in Vermont’s GOP fueled by young candidates and strategists, who are motivated to take power at all levels.
State Rep.-Elect Corey Parent of St. Albans. Photo from his campaign website.
Corey Parent, 24, also of St. Albans, will be the youngest member of Legislature when he assumes his House seat next January.
“Corey is one of the hardest working people I’ve ever met in my life,” Burns said “His campaign is the blueprint for what we’re trying to do moving forward.”
Parent is a student of political campaigns, going back to when he was 14 and former State Auditor Randy Brock would pick him up at his house and take him around the state on the campaign trail.
He stayed involved in politics, and met Degree working on Rich Tarrant’s unsuccessful campaign against Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, in 2006.
Despite spending heavily Tarrant wasn’t able to challenge Sanders. Parent and Degree, who also worked for former Gov. Jim Douglas, became friends working the Tarrant campaign.
“We’re both students of politics and students of state government,” Degree said.
“You learn a lot more from your failures than your successes,” Parent said.
They saw the ground game that Sanders’ people brought to bear, and in many ways tried to emulate it in their own campaigns, he said.
They hired a field staffer in St. Albans, worked with data to identify voters, phone banked heavily and most importantly, according to Parent, “knocked on every door twice.”
Franklin County Republicans coordinated their message and worked closely to promote each other’s candidacies.
Degree, who describes incumbent Franklin County Senator Norm McAllister as a friend more than a mentor, said the two were an effective team against Democrat Sarah Kittell, a former Senator seeking to return to office.
But there was coordination at all levels, with officials in county government getting involved, and other Republican incumbents working hard to help out as well, he said.
“Lynn Dickinson was with us at 5 p.m. on election night making phone calls on our behalf, when she could have had her feet up,” Degree said, of the St. Albans Republican who was unapposed in her district.
Counterpoint
Ben Sarle, communications and outreach director for the Vermont Democratic Party, said Parent, Degree and other Republicans who landed seats in the Legislature are taking credit for a national swing of the pendulum in the Republican’s favor; one that he vows won’t be possible in 2016.
“The Republican Party didn’t do anything right,” he said. “They were the beneficiaries of a temporary national environmental change in politics. I don’t see this being the case in two years.”
Democrats had a field office in St. Albans and operatives worked long hours in an exhaustive get out the vote effort, Sarle said.
“None of us would’ve done anything different in Franklin County,” he added, “Honestly, it’s a conservative county and we’ve done everything possible there.”
Rep. Mike McCarthy, D-St. Albans, who lost his seat to Parent, took a slightly different view. He praised the work of Democrats in Franklin County, but readily acknowledged Parent’s industriousness on the campaign trail.
“He ran an incredible campaign,” McCarthy said of Parent.
But McCarthy also said there were a confluence of other factors that worked against him in the race. Turnout was a problem for Democrats, and the money that the RSLC poured into the state hurt too.
Democrats were forced into making a more nuanced argument about how their efforts on health care and education are on the right track, but are extremely difficult to carry out and won’t quickly bear fruit, he said.
“Whereas our opponents stuck to a message of ‘we want things to move faster,’ and ‘we can do better,’” McCarthy said.
That could come back to haunt newly elected Republicans in two years when they have to come back to Franklin County and run on their records, he said, because it won’t be easy to deliver.
Another issue, at least in his race, was that many voters split their tickets in his two-seat district, McCarthy said, voting for Parent as well as himself or longtime Rep. Kathleen Keenan, D-St. Albans, who held her seat by narrow margin.
That same dynamic could have picked off other incumbent Democrats in districts where a Republican was the top vote getter, such as Addison 4. There, Republican Fred Baser bested Rep. Mike Fisher, D-Lincoln, and David Sharpe, D-Bristol. Fisher finished third in a race for two seats.
As a competitive person, and someone who fully intends to stay involved in local politics, McCarthy said he would have liked to have faced Parent in a head-to-head contest. But he said it was also difficult to match Parent’s pace with a two-year-old daughter and a demanding job.
Keenan also acknowledged that the Republicans were better coordinated across the county than they were in the past.
“They were very well organized,” she said.
But Keenan added that their message of dissatisfaction was bolstered by the election’s zeitgeist; “The economy is tough, property taxes are going up, people don’t feel like they have a handle on their own destiny.”
It’s a feeling that Republicans, being out of power, were better able to capitalize on, she added.
Burns, Degree, Parent and others in the vanguard of a younger, more energetic Republican party say this is just the beginning for them. They hope to continue to gain ground even in 2016, when conventional wisdom says they could take a step backward.
“I’m totally convinced we could make every seat in the House and Senate a contested seat,” Burns said. “It just takes the right candidates.”
“It’s our job to find those candidates.”
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