It’s time to focus on the task at hand, electing the Democrat slate of statewide candidates and returning substantial majorities to the House and Senate. We’re finally ready to move past deadlock in Montpelier.
Among the rest of the Vermont electorate, there are three groups.
1. Democrats and Progressives who can be counted on to support our candidates: about 36% of the electorate. We have to get these people to the polls. They are concentrated in Windham, Windsor, Washington and Chittenden counties. Rolling up big turnouts in those 4 counties is essential.
2. GOP stalwarts who are as partisan on the other side as we are on ours: about 28% of the electorate. About 15% are Tea Party types.
So the partisan voters in Vermont use up about (36 + 28) 64%, or two-thirds, of the electorate.
3. The independents. Generally speaking they break 60-40 in favor of Democrat candidates (this is readily seen in the downticket statewide results). In other words the 36% of independents generally break 21% – 15% for Dems, so for any given standard Dem vs GOP race it should work out to
36 + 21 vs 28 + 15, or 57% – 43%.
Even if the independents break 50-50 the Dems have a big advantage:
36 + 18 vs 28 + 18, or 54% – 46%
So I’d argue that promoting a big Democrat turnout is really the single most important thing we need to accomplish between now and November.
Dubie does not have the profile Jim Douglas had. Jim Douglas knew or had shook hands with nearly half the Vermont electorate; he is the ONLY candidate who has broken the independent pattern in Vermont, and he’s done it on the strength 40 years of public service of a type that put him in position to attend every ribbon cutting ceremony. Gov Scissorhands had the nickname before he was elected. With Jim Douglas out of the picture, and a need to turn out the base being of primary importance, the statewide candidates need to highlight the traditional GOP positions Dubie and the rest are wedded to: ProLife, anti-healthcare-reform, etc.
I hope the statewide candidates work out a comprehensive campaign effort that has them working together.
The governor’s race was way too close for comfort, and the fact that Steve Howard wasn’t elected Lt Gov was entirely unnecessary.
There is a 55%+ Democrat majority to be had in Vermont for all statewide offices. Why is it that the party cannot sustain the kind of ongoing, incremental efforts necessary to cement this majority? Why is it that we don’t run genuine tickets? How come we stick to the boom-and-bust ‘coordinated campaign’ model even though year after year it fails to deliver across-the-board wins?
In my opinion this is a database-management problem rooted in lack of appropriate staffing. I did some calling this year and any number of staunch party members were in the system as undecideds — and we’ve been working with the same data for almost a decade now. What a shameful waste of effort.
Wouldn’t it be great if the party were treated as a genuine community-building organization and not as a useful fiction by the next generation of party leaders? In environments like Vermont, where you have a significant enduring progressive majority, a political party devoting its resources to identifying and connecting that majority can work.