When President Obama heads to Charlotte, N.C., next week for the Democratic National Convention, former governor Mitt Romney will journey north to the one place the national press won't find him.
Reading, Vt.
With the nation's attention turning to the Democratic confab, Romney plans to hunker down at the Reading home of his former lieutenant governor, Kerry Healey, to prepare for this fall's three presidential debates.
Romney senior adviser Kevin Madden confirmed to CNN, the Washington Post and others Saturday that the Republican nominee will be in Vermont Tuesday through Thursday. But Madden did not rule out the possibility that Romney would leave the Green Mountains occasionally to campaign in more battleground-y states, according to Reuters.
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Demonstrating an apparent dearth of self-awareness, a Vermont-based "super-PAC" whose creation opened the door for super PACs to operate in Vermont released a statement Thursday decrying the influence of an out-of-state super PAC in Tuesday's primary election — and using the situation to justify its own existence.
Got it? Didn't think so. Let me take you back.
Six weeks ago, a liberal advocacy group called Vermont Priorities announced it was launching Vermont's first home-grown super PAC, allowing it to raise and spend unlimited funds on state elections. Why? Because the folks behind it — Vermont Priorities chairman Bob Stannard (pictured) and the group's consultant, KSE's Todd Bailey — were greatly a-feared that big, bad out-of-state super PACs would get all up in Vermont's otherwise pure elections.
By starting their own, way more awesome super PAC, Stannard and Bailey reasoned, they'd be ready to do battle with Karl Rove and the dreaded Koch brothers when those dudes inevitably came to town. Meanwhile, without all those pesky campaign finance restrictions, Vermont Priorities would able to raise and spend as much as they liked to elect their fellow liberals to office!
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While Republicans from around the country gather in Tampa this week, a Burlington designer is looking back on his small but significant contribution to a different presidential campaign.
In the summer of 1992, Doug Dunbebin was a graphic artist living in Beltsville, Md. when he came up with a design and slogan for the Clinton-Gore ticket that would soon catch fire and become one of the iconic images of the 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns.
In June 1992, then-candidate Clinton appeared on the "Arsenio Hall Show" and ripped out a bluesy version of Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" on his tenor saxophone. It was a seminal moment in Clinton's political career — as Hall remarked afterward, "It's good to see a Democrat blow something other than an election" — and earned him new found respect and support among young and minority voters.
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Burlington City Councilor Ed Adrian (D-Ward 1) is resigning effective September 30. He informed fellow councilors in an email this morning.
Did he do it to spend more time with his family? Adrian tells Seven Days that he's stepping down for a "combination of reasons."
"There's no great revelation there," he says. "I just think the Senate race actually brought some clarity to me and the path I need to choose right now, and it's not one of volunteer political service. It's just the fact that [council service] is a great consumer of time that puts pressure on everything.
"I know that sounds nebulous," he added.
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After a late-night cliffhanger of a primary, Democratic Attorney General Bill Sorrell on Tuesday launched the next phase of his bid to keep his job: a general election fight against Republican businessman Jack McMullen.
"I do have a tough race and it's going to be so great to not have it be a primary, because there are very real differences between myself and my Republican opponent," Sorrell told a rowdy crowd of Democrats at a party unity rally staged at Burlington's Main Street Landing.
"For one, I'm admitted to the bar and can practice law in the courts of this state and he can't. He's wealthy; I'm not. He thinks we should drop the Vermont Yankee — the Entergy — appeal. There's no way we're going to do that," Sorrell said. "He thinks our food labeling laws are bad for business. I think they're good for consumers, and I'm going to uphold and enforce those laws."
Sorrell's pivot to the general election came just an hour and a half after Democratic challenger T.J. Donovan conceded to Sorrell by phone, admitting that he'd narrowly lost a rare, intra-party fight against the 15-year incumbent.
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The attorney general race is getting most of the attention on the morning after Vermont's 2012 primary, but as Paul Heintz wrote about in his Fair Game column on August 8, there were plenty of other interesting races dotting the state's voting landscape. Here's a roundup of some other notable results:
Governor - Progressive
First, the statewide races: Martha Abbott was the only announced candidate for governor in the Progressive Party primary, and it was expected that she would drop out of the race so as not to siphon away too many left-wing votes from Gov. Peter Shumlin. But some of Shumlin's most vehement detractors mounted a write-in campaign to nominate activist Annette Smith for the Progs.
See the rest of the results — with helpful charts and graphs — on Off Message.
Happy primary day, Vermont! Can you smell the democracy in the air?
Per Seven Days tradition, we'll be running a live blog and chat with our reporters and readers tonight, starting at 6 p.m. and going until...late. Paul Heintz and Andy Bromage will be out in the field, and we invite you to stop by and tell them about the big election day news in your town. I'll be back at 7D headquarters gathering the latest updates. We'll post results of the contentious races, including the big Democratic attorney general race, as we get them. Click here to go to our Vermont primary election page.
Haven't voted yet? Polls close at 7 p.m. tonight. Here's a list of polling places from the Secretary of State's office. If you still haven't decided who to vote for, you're not alone. In the Sorrell vs. Donovan battle, check out Andy Bromage's piece on the race, and take another look at their August 15 debate. Paul Heintz spotlighted some of the other big primary races in his Fair Game column a few weeks ago.
We'll see you tonight at 6 p.m. Until then, let us know how turnout is in your town and what your neighbors are talking about in the comments.
Updated below: Donovan racks up another newspaper endorsement.
In the closing days of the race for the Democratic nomination for attorney general, newspaper endorsements are steadily trickling in. And, as with endorsements from politicians not named Howard Dean, Chittenden County State's Attorney T.J. Donovan appears to be cleaning up.
Last Friday the Stowe Reporter and Waterbury Record, which are both owned by Biddle Duke, weighed in — arguing that Donovan has "innovative ideas... and the leadership skills to put those ideas to work." Sorrell, the papers' editorial board wrote, "has appeared distant and remote — at least until he faced a real challenger."
On Wednesday, St. Albans Messenger publisher Emerson Lynn used the "R" word as well to describe the incumbent AG: "Mr. Sorrell's extended tenure has made him more remote, less approachable. He's lost that personal connection that Mr. Donovan would restore." Sorrell's challenger, Lynn wrote, "is capable of communicating at a level that will benefit Vermonters directly. He is one among us and looks at problems at a community level, which is where he lives and works."
Lynn followed up Thursday with another, more pointed editorial — this one arguing that by waging a fight at the U.S. Supreme Court to limit the influence of money in politics and then accepting nearly $200,000 in support from a "super PAC," Sorrell was being a tad inconsistent: "But isn't it hypocritical to argue against the influence of big money in Vermont politics, and then be the beneficiary of such largess without the slightest hint of regret or opposition?"
On Friday, the Burlington Free Press weighed in, giving its kiss of death — ahem, I mean endorsement — to Donovan as well. As Seven Days has snarkily noted over the years, the Freeps' has a nearly spotless record in endorsing the eventual loser of Burlington mayoral races. Since 1981, the city's paper of record has only once picked the winner of a mayor's race: when it chose Progressive Peter Clavelle over Republican Kurt Wright in 1999. You may recall that in March, the Freep's picked Wright over eventual winner Miro Weinberger.
To be fair, the point of an endorsement is not at all to pick a winner. And, anyway, the Freeps' track record of endorsing successful candidates at the statewide level is far better. In 2010, the paper chose Democrat Peter Shumlin over Republican Brian Dubie. And during former Republican governor Jim Douglas' reign, the Freeps stuck with him over his unsuccessful rivals.
Writing on behalf of the Freep's three-member editorial board — which also includes publisher Jim Fogler and executive editor Mike Townsend — editorial page editor Aki Soga argues that Donovan "will bring a new energy" to the AG's office, presenting "an alternative to the comforts of incumbency." Needless to say, the Freeps gives Donovan points for stressing government transparency throughout his campaign.
Will any more Vermont newspapers put their fingers on the scale in the next couple of days? Two that won't are the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, which are both owned by John Mitchell. Editorial page editor David Moats tells Seven Days that, as the two papers often do, they are sitting out the primary election.
Update — August 27, 12 p.m.
Donovan took home another newspaper endorsement this weekend. The Valley News, which is based in Lebanon, N.H., but which covers Upper Valley towns on both sides of the Connecticut River, wrote Saturday that it supports Donovan for two reasons: The paper believes Donovan would prioritize developing alternatives to incarceration in Vermont and would "more forcefully promote increased openness for police records of all kind."
Photo by Paul Heintz
When word spread Wednesday afternoon that Castleton State College's new-ish polling center would release fresh results on the bitterly contested Democratic primary race for attorney general, reporters drooled.
At least, I did.
After all, we live in one of the least-polled states in the union, leaving political reporters to simply guess what real people are thinking or, worse yet, to dust off the rolodex and query retired Middlebury College professor Eric Davis — Vermont's Pundit Laureate, as Green Mountain Daily's John Walters endearingly calls him — who will readily provide the latest conventional wisdom.
So when Castleton released the first publicly available poll of the AG's race since May — back when the contest was still in its infancy — reporters surely went straight to Castleton Polling Institute director Rich Clark to seek his insight into what his poll tells — and doesn't tell — us about the state of the race. Right?
Uhhh, not exactly. Their speed-dials seemingly frozen on Eric Davis' number, at least three news outlets went straight to the Oracle of Middlebury to see what he thought about a poll he didn't conduct.
In a story titled, "The leader is ... uncertain: Poll results doubtful," the Vermont Press Bureau's Peter Hirschfeld brings in the Pundit Laureate in the fifth graph, before quoting Clark himself saying much the same:
“I have serious doubts about the validity of this poll,” said Eric Davis, professor emeritus of political science at Middlebury College.
Terri Hallenbeck over at the Burlington Free Press goes so far as to lead her story with Davis' take-down:
A poll released Wednesday suggests incumbent Bill Sorrell leads challenger T.J. Donovan in the Democratic primary race for attorney general, but one political scientist argued the poll has little validity.
VTDigger's Taylor Dobbs, meanwhile, doesn't even bother bringing Clark into the story, instead devoting most of his piece to Davis' critique:
“I have very, very serious doubts about the validity of a poll that says it has that many people who are likely to vote in a primary,” Davis said. “I think this Castleton survey over-reports likely voting in the primary by three, perhaps as many as four times.”
Does Davis have a point? Does a survey that relies upon respondents to self-identify whether they'll vote in a snoozer of a late August primary they probably won't actually vote in paint an incomplete portrait? Totes. As I argued back in May — and as Clark himself readily admits in a summary of his results —over-reporting intent to vote is a chronic problem in public opinion polls and is exacerbated when turnout is especially low.
Would a poll of those who've actually voted in the past couple of Democratic primaries be more accurate? Sure. Would a larger sample size have reduced the poll's 7 percent margin-of-error? Mos' def. Would a pair of questions gauging the candidates' name recognition be informative? No doubt.
But do these failings render the Castleton poll invalid? Hardly. Polls rarely pin down precisely where an uncertain primary electorate stands, nor are they terribly good at predicting the outcome of races that have little in the way of precedent. Keep in mind that next Tuesday's election is only the second since the Legislature voted to move primary day three weeks earlier — into the summer — and the first such election without a blockbuster gubernatorial primary at the top of the ballot.
What this poll does provide is a second, time-stamped look at the preferences of a particular slice of the electorate — dudes who claim they're going to vote in the primary — three months after a similar group was surveyed by the same pollster. By establishing a baseline in May of where Vermonters stood on the AG race before it had truly begun — and relying upon a similar number of respondents — Castleton's latest poll tells us two important things:
Am I headed to Intrade to bet my last paycheck on Clark's results mirroring next Tuesday's outcome? No way. But in a poll-starved state like this, I say more information — in the appropriate context — is always better than less.
Without it, dear reader, you're left listening to blowhards like me — informed by guesswork, campaign spin and occasional interaction with the outside world. Or, even worse, drivel like this:
"If the primary had been held three weeks ago when the early voting period began, I believe Donovan would have won. Sorrell has made it a tighter race over the last couple of weeks."
And this:
"I would say at this point, I would give Donovan about a 55 to 60 percent probability of winning the primary. But at the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if Bill Sorrell were able to pull out a narrow victory at the very end."
Both of those predictions came last weekend from Eric Davis himself, speaking with VPR's Peter Biello Saturday morning.
Leaving aside for the moment the Pundit Laureate's characteristic equivocation, what I would like to know is precisely what methodology the Oracle of Middlebury used to determine a great shift in the mood of the electorate these past three weeks. More importantly, just how is he able to pin down Donovan's probability of winning to between 55 and 60 percent? That is mighty precise.
The answers of 223 randomly-sampled, self-identified Democratic primary voters may not tell us everything we want to know about what's going to happen next Tuesday. But they tell us a lot more than the guesstimates of a sample of one: a retired professor reading his newspapers in Middlebury, waiting for the next reporter to call.
Photo of Rich Clark provided by Castleton State College.