Howard Dean, the former Democratic governor and presidential candidate, endorsed Democrat Beth Pearce in her bid to remain state treasurer on Wednesday. The announcement matched a parallel move by his Republican counterpart Jim Douglas earlier this week.
Dean said the treasurer’s race is an informal referendum on Super PACs, and he urged voters to show their displeasure with Super PACs by voting against Wilton. He blasted Wilton as too partisan a candidate for the job.
“I am concerned at the tenor of Wendy Wilton’s campaign,” said Dean. “I think she is a partisan politician. She took very partisan positions when she was in the Legislature. She has the backing of someone who’s evidently spent several hundred thousand dollars, who’s a very partisan person, well outside the mainstream.”
Dean suggested that Wilton make a bid for another office, like governor or lieutenant governor, better suited to her views.
“This race wouldn’t be a race, without the hundreds of thousands of dollars that a right-wing activist is pouring into the race,” continued Dean. “This is really a referendum on whether you want big money, in terms of these Super PACS, to play a role in Vermont politics.”
Wilton campaign manager Bradford Broyles pushed back on the accusation that the Rutland treasurer has out-of-the-mainstream conservative political tendencies. “She’s not partisan,” Broyles said. “She’s never brought partisan politics into the treasurer’s office, period. And she will not as state treasurer.”
Broyles had no comment on whether the Wilton campaign welcomed the support of Vermonters First. “What people think about Vermonters First is not something we’re involved with,” he said. “It’s not part of our campaign.”
He pointed out that former governor Douglas, who backs Wilton, had served as state treasurer, unlike Dean. Douglas wants Wilton to bring back balance to Montpelier, Broyles said.
Earlier this week, Douglas told VTDigger that he’d endorsed Wilton, a longtime personal friend, partly because he thinks it’s best to have a governor and treasurer from different parties. In an ad for Wilton, Douglas says she is a “professional, non-political fiscal leader.”
Middlebury College political science professor Bert Johnson played down the importance of the endorsements from the two senior politicians. He said former governors making an appearance for downticket races isn’t all that uncommon, especially when there’s a competitive race.
“The general message on endorsements from political science is that they don’t make much difference,” Johnson said. “People’s vote choices tend to be based more on party identification and general feelings about the way things are going, and not necessarily based on how big name people are deciding.”
He reiterated that this applied even to politicians as popular as Dean and Douglas, arguing that the parallel endorsements effectively cancel each other out, and mostly kick up a bit of media attention late in the election cycle.
Dean last came onto the local political scene in a visible way by backing Bill Sorrell, early in his competitive primary against TJ Donovan. Even though both races were tense and heated, Dean said the influence of Super PAC money here made the two difficult to compare.
The endorsements come with less than a week left until elections. VPR has reported that early votes, cast and unchangeable before Nov. 6, could make up a third of all votes cast in some communities.
According to data from the Secretary of State, about 50,500 voted early in the last elections, over a fifth of the 244,000 votes cast.
The only known poll on the treasurer’s race gives Pearce a 46 percent to 37 percent lead over Wilton if the candidates’ parties are disclosed, but otherwise deems the race too close to call. Rich Clark, director of the state’s Castleton Polling Institute, told VTDigger last week that he won’t be releasing any election polls before Tuesday.
