Editor’s note: VTDigger is profiling each of the five leading candidates for governor.
[W]hen Democratic gubernatorial candidate Matt Dunne launched his campaign in Barre in October, he did so in characteristically earnest fashion.
Vermont is at a critical juncture, Dunne told supporters. People have lost faith in government, he said, and the state needs competent and fair-minded leadership to restore trust in Montpelier and invigorate a state economy wracked by uncertainty.
Dunne made the case that his mix of legislative, public service and business experience is the right prescription to bring Vermonters through a liminal time.
“The clock is ticking,” he said. “This campaign needs to be about action, and it needs to be about urgency.”
Dunne also frequently talks about what he and other political observers say is a virtually unprecedented transition of power for the state. This election season, Vermont will vote in a new governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. And in the Statehouse, lawmakers will select a new House speaker and Senate president.
That transformation has collided with Dunne’s own personal urgency, almost a compulsion, to make a difference in the world. It’s a trait that was nurtured by his civic-minded parents and the Upper Valley community where he was raised.
But it was losing his father in boyhood and then his mother in his early 30s that turned that sense of urgency into a tenacity that close friends and relatives say critics often mistake for naked political ambition.
“I don’t think Matt’s ever felt like he had a lot of time,” said his wife, Sarah Stewart Taylor, an author and former journalist.
Can hit the right notes
Dunne has run a shrewd and well-financed primary campaign. His political professionalism is due in part to experience. Dunne is a veteran of several electoral bouts, including two losing bids for statewide office — lieutenant governor in 2006 and governor in 2010.
On the campaign trail, Dunne comes across as a practiced, forceful public speaker, who, in person, can drop back to a quiet, soothing tone. He often gesticulates to drive home a point at any volume.
Once the wunderkind of Vermont politics, Dunne, at 46, has lost none of the intensity in his deep-set eyes. The only signs of wear and tear are a slightly receding hairline and a bit of gray creeping into his hair.
The former Google executive earned political points for his early endorsement of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid in October, when other prominent Democrats were fence sitting or endorsing Hillary Clinton.
It was a prescient political move, even if it stemmed from conviction — which Dunne says it did — as Sanders won 86 percent of the vote in Vermont’s Democratic presidential primary.
For an electorate paying only mild attention to the governor’s race, Dunne — who spent a decade in the Legislature and worked in President Bill Clinton’s administration — carved out a spot for himself as a progressive outsider. It’s a position not unlike that of Sanders, who, after more than 25 years in Congress, is the consummate insider outsider.
Dunne says that seizing the progressive mantle is an expression of his long-held political beliefs, not political maneuvering.
He has further hitched his wagon to Sanders with television ads promising to “finish what Bernie started” by banning direct corporate campaign contributions in Vermont.
In an episode dismissed as a political stunt by one of his opponents, former Transportation Secretary Sue Minter, Dunne gave back $16,000 in corporate contributions, calling on other candidates to do the same.
Dunne said he was motivated by the cynicism about money in politics that he was hearing on the campaign trail and was inspired by Sanders’ presidential campaign, which passed over large donors and super PACs to raise money directly from supporters through small contributions.
Still, when asked in a recent interview if he would accept support from the Democratic Governors Association, which rakes in millions from corporations — including $686,000 from drugmaker Pfizer and $520,000 from Wal-Mart in this cycle — he said he would.
Dunne said the difference, which wouldn’t be the case with DGA support, is the “direct relationship between a corporation — and a corporate interest — and a candidate.”
He said he’d prefer a federal law prohibiting corporate money from political contests, but he also intimated a reluctance to hobble his own campaign by spurning the DGA, which isn’t likely to get involved until after the primary.
“I think Citizens United was a terrible decision on a wide variety of levels. I don’t believe corporations are people,” Dunne said. “I do believe the DGA, in general, represents values that I share, and if people have a concern about that they can address that with me.”
Dunne has further cultivated his image as a progressive outsider in this election cycle by tweaking Gov. Peter Shumlin’s administration on health care, ethics and its handling of contract negotiations with the Vermont State Employees’ Association.
Putting the state back on the path to universal health care is a high priority, the former state senator said. Dunne was among the sponsors of Vermont’s first universal health care legislation in 1994.
“I have not equivocated. Health care is a human right,” Dunne says frequently.
That’s a clear nod to the Vermont Workers’ Center campaign using the same phrase, which helped Shumlin defeat Dunne in the 2010 Democratic primary. Shumlin ultimately abandoned his promised single-payer health care system, and that decision arguably brought the governor’s political prospects to a halt.
Dunne’s full-throated support for the VSEA, and his pledge to bring a $15 minimum wage to Vermont, helped him win coveted labor endorsements.
He has channeled the left’s frustration with Shumlin by calling for ethics reform in the wake of the Jay Peak scandal involving investors’ money and promising to “restore trust in government” by fixing the Vermont Health Connect website.
Legislative career and electoral losses
Dunne got his first taste of electoral politics passing out fliers for Peter Welch, the Democratic onetime state senator and now U.S. representative who also lives in Hartland, where Dunne grew up.
After Dunne returned to Vermont from Brown University with a degree in public policy, Welch urged him to run for the Legislature.
It has become personal lore, though the congressman confirms its veracity, that Welch, then out of politics, wrote a check to a campaign committee for Dunne that didn’t exist. Dunne, who hadn’t until that point decided to run, had to create a bank account to cash the check.
Elected as a state representative in 1992 at the age of 22, Dunne rose to the position of majority whip in the House in just six years before he was tapped by the Clinton administration to head the AmeriCorps VISTA program at age 30.
After his stint in D.C., Dunne returned to Hartland in 2001. That year, he moved into his parents’ home and was married. He returned to the Legislature soon after and was elected to the state Senate in 2002.
Legislative colleagues describe Dunne’s support for smart development initiatives, legislation that enabled Vermont to develop brownfields, as well as his knack for leveraging federal money.
Supporters, such as Sen. Dick McCormack, D-Windsor, who encouraged Dunne to run for state Senate, praise his boundless energy.
Former state Sen. Vince Illuzzi, who represented Essex-Orleans with both an R and a D next to his name, said that in Dunne’s pre-Google days as a senator, he sometimes appeared to struggle to make ends meet but remained passionately engaged in legislative affairs.
“You know we had a lot of fun, but I think it was a difficult time for him,” Illuzzi said.
In 2005, when it became clear then-U.S. Rep. Bernie Sanders was planning to run for the Senate seat he now holds, Dunne explored a bid for Congress — a sign of his political ambition or a hallmark of his urgency to make a difference, depending on whom you ask.
After learning that Welch planned to run for the congressional seat, Dunne relented and launched a bid for lieutenant governor. Although he won the Democratic primary, Dunne lost to Republican Brian Dubie in the 2006 general election.
Losing hasn’t dampened his interest in serving. Dunne said in a recent interview that, while he would be disappointed if he lost this time, he wouldn’t waste time licking his wounds — he would find another way to be of service to his community, since that’s just how he was raised.
Shaped by Hartland, shaped by loss
Pragmatic intellectuals, Dunne’s parents taught him by example that ideas need to be followed with action. They also gave him a foundation of love and support, impressing on him the value of public service and fostering his enduring belief in a politics of empowering others.
Those values were reinforced throughout his upbringing in Hartland, where Town Meeting Day was serious business and spirited debates were followed by open votes, not Australian balloting.
Dunne’s father, John Dunne, was a lawyer and activist who also took on big responsibilities at a young age. At 19, John Dunne became involved in North Carolina’s civil rights movement, eventually being jailed for three months. He later played a crucial role in forging the Vermont Land Trust. Many who knew him describe John Dunne as “larger than life,” especially in the eyes of his two boys.
Despite a busy legal career, an active farm and persistent community involvement, John Dunne was, by several accounts, an attentive father who carved out significant time to be with Dunne and his younger brother.
Matt Dunne was 13 when his father died of undiagnosed melanoma at age 39.
“I remember the year Matt turned 39,” said the candidate’s wife. “It was a really profound thing for him to turn 39 and then get to have a little more. To have more than what his father got.”
Taylor said she believes that watershed moment reinforced his desire to serve. The years since, she said, have felt like a bonus to Dunne.
A mother, a partner and a friend
Dunne frequently talks about losing his father, and its lasting effect on him, while on the campaign trail, not least because of the way the town of Hartland rallied around his family in its time of need.
It’s less common for Dunne to speak publicly about losing his mother, Faith Weinstein Dunne, who also had a profound impact on the man he has become.
Profiles on Dunne from the 2010 primary campaign published by VTDigger and Seven Days mention John Dunne’s death, but neither article notes Faith Dunne’s death.
Taylor speculated that, having had to share the story of losing his father since his first foray into public life more than two decades ago, Dunne has created a narrative around John Dunne’s death that he can share easily.
Faith Dunne died unexpectedly of heart failure in 2001 at age 60. Matt Dunne, who was 31, wrapped up his stint in D.C. and settled down in the farmhouse where he was raised. He and Taylor were married shortly after his mother’s death. That same year he won the 2002 election for state Senate.
“When we first moved back, her purse still hung on a chair in the kitchen,” Taylor said, noting that Faith Dunne remains a strong presence in their home.
Taylor prepares meals in her late mother-in-law’s cookware, and many of the furnishings and art that decorate the home haven’t changed.
Faith Dunne was a lifelong educator and among the first tenured female professors at Dartmouth College. Many recall her fighting tirelessly for Hartland school budgets. She had an “immense amount of energy for her community,” said Welch, whose late first wife was also a Dartmouth professor.
She was also “the funniest and most insightful person in any room,” Dunne wrote in a Mother’s Day tribute. In the decades after John Dunne’s death, the son and his mother forged a partnership that transcended a traditional mother-son relationship — one that centered on keeping the family afloat, with Dunne eventually doing the books for her educational consultancy.
It was a relationship strained, but never tarnished, by her struggles with alcoholism, Dunne said.
Faith Dunne presided over large meals, delegating chores and setting the tone for dinner table conversations that would inevitably get political. People who attended meals at the Hartland farmhouse were encouraged to voice an opinion but expected to be able to defend it, Dunne and others recall.
“She was a very commanding presence. There were a lot of people who loved her but were also a little afraid of her,” Taylor said. “You wanted to be your best around her.”
There was a rotating cast of characters at the Dunne farmhouse while Matt was growing up that included activists from New York and elsewhere. The “open door” policy, as many described it, continued after Dunne’s father died, with many people his mother mentored.
Vermont’s educational system and professional ranks are filled with people who were mentored or inspired by her, according to those who knew her, including Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe and Burlington City Attorney Eileen Blackwood.
Matt Dunne has inherited the pride and satisfaction his mother found in helping young people achieve beyond what they thought possible.
The politics of personal empowerment
As a theater instructor and later as the assistant director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy, Dunne has followed in his mother’s footsteps by empowering young people and turning them on to careers in public service.
Sheila Vowinkel, a Dunne supporter and former House representative, said her daughter was among those Dunne inspired. She got a degree in political science and has worked for the political action committee Emily’s List and most recently on the successful campaign of Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards.
Vowinkel’s daughter is still in touch with Dunne and has consistently turned to him for references and career advice, Vowinkel said.
When Dunne was in the House and “piecemealing” his income by running the Glory Days of the Railroad Festival in White River Junction, teaching a summer theater program there and running Hanover High School’s theater program in the fall, he cast an “absolutely hysterical” ninth-grader named Robby Mook in a play.
Mook, who grew up in Norwich, showed interest in politics, and, it being an election year, Dunne asked him to volunteer on his House campaign. When Dunne was majority whip, he prevailed on former House Speaker Michael Obuchowski to hire Mook as the Democratic House campaign’s first paid staffer.
“I called up Robby, who was trying to figure out what to do with his summer, and I said, ‘I know what you’re doing,’ and he said, ‘Matt, I don’t know how to do (political fundraising).’ I said, ‘Neither do I. Let’s go,’” Dunne recalled, becoming increasingly animated with the telling.
Mook is now Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager and one of the most respected Democratic strategists in the country. Dunne marvels at Mook’s success. He told Seven Days in a profile on Mook that he now finds himself calling his former student for counsel.
Nick Charyk, Dunne’s campaign manager, followed a similar path into politics, getting his start just after college volunteering on Dunne’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign. They made him a field director, and Charyk “knocked it out of the park,” according to Dunne.
Charyk was then hired to run the Vermont Democratic House campaign, winning accolades for his success in the 2012 election cycle, and later went to work as political director for the Vermont Democratic Party.
Helping people exceed their own expectations was Dunne’s modus operandi as director of AmeriCorps VISTA, which is described on his website as a 6,000-person agency that works to “empower people out of poverty.”
Indeed, the idea of “empowering people out of poverty” suffuses Dunne’s anti-poverty platform with initiatives such as a statewide microlending program to help poor people start businesses, development accounts or earned savings programs, and financial literacy classes to help people built assets.
To some critics, who did not want to go on the record because they work in politics, it can sound like Dunne is echoing conservative dogma suggesting the poor take responsibility for their situation and find ways to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.
Dunne says that nothing could be further from the truth, and the critique ignores the first plank in his anti-poverty platform, which states that in “order to emerge from poverty, a person needs the basics of food, shelter, transportation and health care.”
In addition to a $15 minimum wage, Dunne says he would support the state’s driver restoration pilot program, which helps drivers pay off old fines to get their licenses back in good standing.
The high cost of housing, he says, prevents many poor Vermonters from living where they work. Dunne says he will issue bonds to help finance affordable homes and efficiency projects to improve existing housing, pointing out that high utility costs are passed on to renters.
“What people don’t then talk about (after basic needs are met) is how you create a roadmap out of poverty,” Dunne said. “What I believe in my core, and I’ve seen actually work, is that most people in poverty don’t want to be in poverty and if given the tools to be self-sufficient, will pursue them.”
Going online, but not going away
Dunne’s blending of his parents’ civic-minded, communal agrarianism with tech jargon he picked up while serving as Google’s director of community affairs is almost steampunk in its haphazard blending of old and knew.
When he started working for Google, he still had dial-up internet at his Hartland home — though he now has “decently speedy” service from Comcast.
During the years he was at Google, Dunne plowed much of his earnings — a salary he said was more money than he ever thought he’d make — into the two old barns on the family property, which after decades of neglect were in desperate need of restoration.
Now with three kids ages 11, 7 and 6, Dunne has grown to value the farm even more. He raises sheep and chickens and teaches his children the same lessons he learned farming with his father.
Dunne doesn’t want Vermont to give up its hard-won pastoral brand, but his economic vision for the state hinges on stepping into the 21st century.
And that means broadband access, Dunne says, down to the last mile.
The cornerstone of that vision is the idea of “importing money and exporting value.” That could take the form of a hot tech startup that catches the fancy of venture capital, or craft-scale consumer goods such as beer, cheese or maple products.
The man who created a Google outpost in White River Junction also proselytizes a vision of making Vermont the “telecommuting capital of the world.” It’s one more way, Dunne says, to bring money to Vermont while providing value in a globalized economy.
Here again, Dunne’s vision can make skeptics uneasy. After all, not everyone is going to find their place in the innovative, value-added economy, and Vermont will still need gas station attendants, waiters, construction workers and others employed in the building trades or service industry.
Dunne says that’s why a $15 minimum wage and other anti-poverty initiatives are so important. He also wants to match online training with job openings in real time.
“Believing in a future for Vermont that is innovation-based has to come with making sure that we have a platform to support everyone,” Dunne said. “If the cost of living increases because there’s greater success, then we have to make sure we’re actually paying people a living wage.”
It’s not just tech and other innovators who stand to benefit from the internet infrastructure, Dunne says — it’s all small businesses in Vermont. He cites a 2012 study by the Boston Consulting Group that shows businesses with an online presence grow 40 percent more quickly than those without.
Burlington City Council President Jane Knodell, a Progressive, endorsed Dunne recently, as did several of her colleagues. Though she praised his support for Sanders, Knodell also said Dunne appeals to her because of his experience in the booming tech industry.
Technology companies in the U.S. are a major driver of wealth and income inequality, Knodell said. In Burlington, where tech gentrification is an anxiety-inducing phenomenon for many residents, Dunne’s detailed plans for affordable housing are welcome ideas, she said in remarks announcing her endorsement.
Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger, who is careful to say he won’t endorse a candidate in the Democratic primary, said Dunne’s career path could be beneficial to the state.
Weinberger, who also grew up in Hartland, said he didn’t get to know Dunne well until they were both in their 20s and involved in state politics. His tech background could prove useful “in ways we can’t fully anticipate now,” Weinberger said.
“That’s the thing when you’re selecting a candidate — it shouldn’t necessarily be thought of as a series of positions on issues,” Weinberger said. “Events, circumstances are going to come up in years ahead where they’re going to use their judgment and experiences.”
For Dunne, no small part of what he will bring to the governorship is his experience growing up in Hartland. If he wins the Democratic primary, and then the general election, Vermont’s governor, the mayor of its largest city and its only member of the U.S. House will all be from the same town of fewer than 4,000 people.
Both Welch and Weinberger lauded the town’s spirit of civic engagement. When asked to account for their hometown’s outsized influence on the rest of the state, neither had a definitive answer.
“Hartland is the center of the universe,” Welch said, pausing before adding, “We’re keeping the secret to ourselves.”
(Correction: An earlier version of this story said Miro Weinberger didn’t know Matt Dunne until their 20s. The mayor said he didn’t know Dunne well until then.)