Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[Y]et another Democrat is running for governor.
This Democrat’s name is … (wait for the drum roll) … Brenda Siegel.
And from the Bennington Battlefield Monument to the Haskell Opera House on the Derby Line-Stanstead border, from Burlington’s Church Street mall to the tiniest hamlet in the Green Mountains comes this unified response:
Who?
OK, so just about as many “who?” reactions greeted the announcements of the other three Democrats in the race, environmentalist James Ehlers, former utility executive Christine Hallquist, and eighth-grader Ethan Sonneborn. None of whom have run for office before.
But if anything, Siegel is farther from the political mainstream than her two main opponents, Hallquist and Ehlers. Her background is in the arts. She’s the executive/artistic director of the Southern Vermont Dance Festival in Brattleboro.
So what we really have here is not just “yet another Democrat” but “yet another Democrat who has never sought or held public office and the mention of whose name draws a blank from most voters” is running for governor.
All of which, according to the conventional political wisdom, heralds a barely noticed primary campaign culminating on Aug. 14 with the selection of a candidate who will likely lose to Republican incumbent Gov. Phil Scott.
As has been noted here before, the conventional political wisdom is usually right: That’s how it gets conventional.
But usually does not mean always, and as Vermont Democrats like to keep repeating these days, this is a most unconventional political year, what with a Republican president most Vermonters actively dislike and a Republican governor who has alienated part of his political base by signing gun control laws. As Siegel noted, “everybody in the race is somebody that’s not traditional,” and while she meant only all four Democrats, that’s still evidence for 2018 being an unconventional year, at least in Vermont.
Besides, this latest entry seems to have some potentially potent political instincts. A 41-year-old Vermont native (born in Brattleboro, she said), Siegel plans to campaign from the perspective of “a low-income single mom” to “see how we can improve on the economy in ways we don’t now look at.”
There are a lot of low-income single mothers in Vermont. Most of them have not been voting in primaries. A candidate who could get them to the polls could end up with more votes than the conventional political wisdom expects.
Siegel also plans to emphasize plans to deal with opioid abuse, and she said extensive treatment and prevention programs could be financed by “taxing and regulating cannabis.”
Polling indicates that most Vermont voters – and especially most Democratic primary voters – would support that policy. Not that Siegel would be the only candidate favoring it. Both Ehlers and Hallquist are for legalizing, regulating, and taxing marijuana.
But Siegel has a personal connection to the issue that could help her express her views more vividly. One reason she is running, she said, is that her 25-year-old nephew, Kaya Siegel, recently died of a heroin overdose.
“I watched the system fail him,” she said.
Like the other two Democratic candidates, Siegel endorses the standard liberal agenda: a higher minimum wage, paid family and medical leave, and what she called “more diversity in our workplace. We’ve learned that trickle-down doesn’t work and poverty trickles up. For me it’s about building a bottom-up economy.”
Siegel acknowledged that she “starts at a financial disadvantage” behind the other two candidates, and much farther behind Scott. She said she has a cadre of volunteer fundraisers and potential donors among members of the left-of-center advocacy groups with which she has been involved for some time.
“I’ve always mixed the arts and politics,” she said. “I have been involved in politics all the way through.”
Some Democrats still hope that Secretary of State Jim Condos will enter the governor’s race. Condos doesn’t deny that he’d like to be governor one day. But he says he also likes being Secretary of State, and elected officials tend to prefer running in races they are all but guaranteed to win, as opposed to uphill contests against a popular incumbent.
The reaction in some circles against the governor’s support of gun control has moved some gun rights advocates to urge Sen. John Rodgers, a moderate Democrat from Orleans County, to challenge Scott. Rodgers said last week that if he did run, he would probably run as a Democrat, though he knew his pro-gun views would make it hard for him to win a Democratic primary.
“I wouldn’t be a one-issue candidate,” he said, adding that his campaign would talk more about rural economic development than guns.
Considering the passions pro and con raised by the gun debate, talk of rural economic development might end up barely getting heard over the din.
Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly stated that Christine Hallquist’s campaign website did not outline her policy positions. It did not include her position on taxing and regulating marijuana.
