Low voter turnout in last week’s election was a sign of voters’ dissatisfaction with Gov. Peter Shumlin, political experts said Tuesday.
But the vote also showed that many people who voted for other Democrats stopped short of endorsing Shumlin.
As many as 39,000 people voted for U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., but not for Shumlin, an analysis of preliminary data from the Secretary of State’s Office shows.
“The people who showed up are the angry ones,” said Garrison Nelson, a political science professor at the University of Vermont.
Welch, also a Democrat, garnered about 123,000 votes last Tuesday, the data shows. Shumlin received roughly 89,500 votes.
The comparison is not apples to apples, Nelson said. Federal races are seldom competitive after a candidate’s first re-election, he said.
“And you don’t make as many enemies in the House because you don’t make decisions. Shumlin is making decisions all the time,” Nelson said.
Political experts say that the low turnout, more than Welch’s higher vote tally, is the true indicator of voters’ frustration with Shumlin.
Shumlin, a two-term incumbent, holds a 2,434-vote lead over Republican Scott Milne, who has not conceded and has until Wednesday to request a recount.
About 43 percent of voters this year turned out for the election. Final numbers are due Wednesday from the Secretary of State’s Office.
Although Shumlin received fewer votes than Welch, slightly more voters participated in the governor’s election. There were 193,000 ballots cast for governor and 191,400 cast in the race for U.S. representative.
Welch also likely captured the votes from many independents, said Eric Davis, a retired political science professor from Middlebury College.
“I think Welch demonstrated an appeal far beyond just the Democratic base,” Davis said.
If voters are dissatisfied, there are four ways to protest an incumbent, Davis said. Voters can leave an office blank, vote for an independent or fringe candidate, write in someone not on the ballot or stay home.
Altogether, candidates other than Shumlin and Milne garnered 8.5 percent of overall votes cast for governor. There were 722 write-in votes in the governor’s race, or about 0.3 percent, the same percentage as two years ago.
Turnout in 2012, a presidential election year, was 65 percent. In 2010, Shumlin’s first election, turnout was 49 percent of the roughly 453,000 eligible voters.
Because no candidate for governor this year garnered more than 50 percent of the vote, the Legislature in January will have the final say. Lawmakers will choose among the top three finishers: Shumlin, Milne and Libertarian Dan Feliciano.
Shumlin lacks a solid base of Democratic supporters, especially in non-presidential election cycles, Nelson said.
“The problem that Peter (Shumlin) has had is Peter does not have base support, major base support,” he said.
The size of a party base in Vermont is hard to estimate because the state does not register voters by party, Davis said.
A good measure of the Republican base is the number of voters who chose Mark Donka, a Republican who ran against Welch, Davis said. Donka received 31 percent of the vote.
Milne, the Republican who ran against Shumlin, received 45 percent of the vote.
There was no election this cycle that made it easy to calculate how many solid Democrats exist within the state’s 443,000 total voters. Dean Corren, who ran for lieutenant governor, ran on the Democratic ticket but is a Progressive.
The Nevada ballot has a “none of the above” option which Davis said Vermont might consider.
