The battle for Randy Brock’s Senate seat in Franklin County got pretty brutal in the waning weeks of the primary campaign. The GOP primary nastiness rivaled that of a General Election fight, with candidates crying foul over anonymous calls, “stolen” domain names and bruising comments from the public.
Joe Sinagra, a former lobbyist, trailed dead last in the Senate race (he prefers to say he finished third) last Tuesday — about 800 votes behind each of his competitors, Norm McAllister and Dustin Degree.
Brock and Sara Kittell, a Democrat, both retired from the Senate last spring, leaving the seats wide open. Two Democrats, Caroline Bright, a recent graduate of St. Michael’s College, former beauty queen and assistant to House Speaker Shap Smith, and Don Collins, a former lawmaker, are on the November ballot.
McAllister and Degree teamed up at the beginning of the season, vying for the opportunity to run in the General Election for the two Franklin County seats.
Sinagra is no stranger to politics (he has long been a political operative for the GOP and was Jack McMullen’s campaign manager in the 1998 race against Vermont celebrity Fred Tuttle). But even this seasoned politico, who is a former lobbyist for the housing industry, was surprised by the lumps he took in the campaign.
First, there was a batch of anonymous fliers that went out to local residents that accused Sinagra of forging ballot petitions for Steve Forbes in 2000. One of those fliers ended up on the windshield of Sue Prent’s car. Prent, a blogger for Green Mountain Daily, followed the links in the flier to “news” reports only to find that there was no substance to the allegation. Another set of fliers attacked his “family values,” Sinagra said.
Prent wrote:
I don’t know all that much about Mr. Sinagra, other than that he has been a lobbyist for the housing industry; but if I were him, I’d be checking my back for knife-wounds.
The biggest blow was news that Sinagra had purchased the normmcallister.com domain name. Just two days before the primary McAllister told WCAX that he didn’t know Sinagra bought the domain name on Aug. 2. McAllister put the url on 20,000 pieces of campaign literature, which had been circulating for months, according to the St. Albans Messenger.
McAllister accused Sinagra on WCAX of engaging in “big-time politician sleaze.” (He didn’t return calls from VTDigger.org.)
McAllister hadn’t actually intended to use the domain name, but it ended up on campaign material anyway, Degree told VTDigger.
Sinagra said he “innocently” made the purchase when he realized McAllister hadn’t secured the domain.
A dirty trick? Sinagra says not so much. He was just taking advantage of an opponent’s crucial mistake. After all, he linked the domain to his own website — not a porn or anti-McAllister site. Sinagra says jimdouglas.com was linked to an adult website in 2002.
The practice is not uncommon. Last winter, Cassandra Gekas, a health care advocate for VPIRG and now a Democratic/Progressive candidate for lieutenant governor, bought domain names similar to that of the anti-single payer 501c4 group Vermonters for Health Care Freedom.
