BROOKFIELD — John Klar was followed by three bleating lambs and his two dogs as he lumbered down his driveway to unlock the gate to his home and small farm.
Three brown cows stood out in an open field in front of a dilapidated wooden barn that’s missing part of its front wall. Sheep wandered through a fenced-off pasture next to his home.
Klar, 56, dressed in a flannel shirt, blue jeans and worn slippers, said his family on his mother’s side includes generations of Vermont farmers. His great-great-great-grandfather purchased land in Brookfield less than a mile away in the mid-1800s, and for years, his family raised sheep and dairy cows on a farm there. It was sold in 1975.
After growing up in Connecticut, and working there for years as a criminal defense attorney, he moved to Vermont to farm in the 1990s. Klar bought a farm in Barton in 1999, where he milked cows and goats, and ran an artisanal raw milk and cheese facility until 2005. Then he moved to Irasburg, where he raised beef and sheep until 2016.
Klar’s move to Vermont, from Connecticut, came after he was first diagnosed with Lyme disease. “So I was really very, very sick,” he said. “And so I said to my wife, I said, ‘You know, my whole life, I’ve been living where the money is.’ I said, ‘Whatever else happens, if I’m going to be sick, at least let’s go to Vermont.’”
Farming is at the center of Klar’s pitch as he mounts an insurgent challenge against incumbent Gov. Phil Scott for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. In building a platform predicated on the governor’s “betrayal” of Vermont Republicans, Klar has brought with him a slew of other candidates seeking to provide conservative alternatives to Phil Scott’s moderation.
On the campaign trail, Klar touts a plan to cut taxes and regulations for farmers, which he says will have far-reaching benefits for the rest of the state’s economy. He lays the plan out in a document that he calls the Vermont Farming Manifesto.
“Vermont’s regulatory constraints, and budgetary pressures, swell each year even as the number of dairy farms diminishes,” Klar writes on his website. “Farms close, bureaucracy grows.”
In response to a candidate questionnaire from the Vermont Council on World Affairs, Klar was asked about his “favorite failure” and how it set him up for later success.
“I’m a farmer. Farmers say ‘the biggest mistakes are the lessons best remembered.’ My ‘favorite failure,’ though, was a family court hearing I lost about 30 years ago. It was unwinnable, but I was completely blindsided. It equipped me for future matters because I learned from what my opponent did,” he said.
Klar says that Scott, a popular incumbent, has moved too far left, and abandoned conservative Vermonters. He faces a steep uphill battle in his bid to unseat the governor.
Scott, whose approval rating was already high before the Covid-19 crisis — 65%, according to Morning Consult — has received bipartisan praise for his handling of the pandemic. A recent poll conducted by several universities including Harvard, Rutgers and Northwestern found that between April and June, more than 70% of Vermonters approved of Scott’s response to the pandemic.
Regaining GOP control of state government
Most of the Republicans Klar has helped organize, including Klar himself, have never held political office, or sought it before.
Dana Colson, who owns a Sharon-based welding equipment company and is running for lieutenant governor, is one of the candidates Klar helped encourage to campaign this year.
Colson, who grew up on a Vermont dairy farm, said that he was attracted to Klar’s platform because he’s seen farms close and businesses flee the state because of high taxes and burdensome regulations.
And he doesn’t believe the current leaders in Montpelier are equipped to right the ship. “You can’t expect the people who created the problem to fix it. If you want real change you’ve got to bring in new people,” Colson said.
Colson said the movement Klar is leading isn’t just about taking the governor’s office. It’s about Republicans regaining as much control as possible in state government.
“I think he’s sincere. He’s very intelligent. He’s got a good plan,” Colson said of Klar. “And like I said, it’s going to take more than one person, we need a whole team of candidates. We want to see every seat in the House and Senate challenged by Republicans.”
Although Klar criticizes progressive politics in Vermont, he says he supported the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary because of the “populist revolt” he inspired — though he notes that he never actually voted for Sanders in the Democratic primary.
While a Republican, Klar says he voted for President Barack Obama twice: in 2008 believing that he would be better equipped than John McCain to lead the country through the financial crisis, and in 2012 because he feared Mitt Romney would escalate trade tensions with China.
Before he moved to Vermont, Klar worked for years as an attorney based in the Hartford, Connecticut area, not far from the town of Hebron, where he grew up. He worked as a public defender, a tax attorney and eventually went into private practice, where much of his work was criminal defense.
“I wasn’t planning on being a criminal attorney, but that’s what came in the door,” he said.
He often refers to his experience as a defense attorney when speaking about criminal justice and discussions about race and policing. He says he doesn’t believe that Scott hasn’t done enough to stand up for law enforcement officers, who are facing calls for reform in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.
“I don’t believe Vermont and our police are like the Minneapolis police officers. I just don’t. I don’t see that happening,” he said.
While he doesn’t believe that there are “no bad apples” on the force in Vermont, and notes that he has fought corrupt police while a defense attorney, he thinks the state should “condemn” bad officers while praising the good.
He has also criticized Scott for calling the state “systemically racist.”
“I’ve seen Phil Scott repeatedly recite Kiah Morris, and an incident I think in Stowe at a camp. And each time he does that, he invokes that as a reason why we’re systemically racist, or why we need to do more,” referring to former Rep. Kiah Morris, who declined to seek reelection in 2018 after facing racial harassment, and an incident in 2018 in which campers were the targets of racial slurs.
“We’ve never been free of episodic cases of people that are racist here in Vermont as well, but that’s a very different thing from saying that our entire court system is racist.”
Responding to a question about the Black Lives Matter movement in the questionnaire distributed by the Vermont Council on World Affairs, Klar said that “labeling all white people systemically racist is counterproductive, deviates from our established principles, and inflames black resentment against whites.”
He also criticized Black Lives Matter.
“By combining issues of race, gender, economic disparity, transgenderism, abortion, and a myriad of others, BLM has created a sort of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ melee that is unclear, divisive, and destructive,” he wrote.
“I will strive for the MLK standard and affirmation of equality for all,” he added, referring to Martin Luther King Jr. “I’m a Frederick Douglass.”
The mural proposal
Earlier this month, Klar asked the Montpelier City Council for permission to paint the words “Liberty and Justice for All” next to the “Black Lives Matter” mural on State Street in Montpelier.
In his application to the council, Klar described his proposal as a “sincere bi-partisan effort to embrace and affirm those vital Constitutional tenets of our nation’s history, in support of ending racial division.”
He said that he wanted to spur a conversation about race, but wanted to express a more “centrist” perspective. He opposes the idea of abolishing the police, for example, and says his message is supportive of the “good cops.”
The council rejected his proposal, and opponents said the message detracts from the Black Lives Matter movement.
On “Fox and Friends” on July 12, Klar called the council’s decision a “blatant violation of our First Amendment freedoms.” He said he is preparing to take the city to court.
Meg Mott, an emeritus political science professor at Marlboro College, said through his proposal, it seems Klar is looking for support from white Vermonters who feel isolated by the racial justice movement.
“I mean obviously his strategy is to play to the concerns that many Vermonters have that in the push for social justice, they’re being left behind,” Mott said. “I don’t think it’s very centrist anymore to want to dilute the message of Black Lives Matter,” she added.
Klar said that he is concerned about attracting “extremist right wingers who think that I’m on their side.” He says his goal with the mural is to bring people on the right and left together.
“If we can’t try to find common ground in the Constitution, I don’t know what the language is to bring those two groups together,” he said.
Klar, who frequently publishes provocative op-eds, is an outspoken critic of Vermont’s politicians and media, including VTDigger.
In December, he set up a GoFundMe page to raise money to pay for the state to release records of communications between Attorney General TJ Donovan, a Democrat, and Planned Parenthood, which helped lead a legislative push in Vermont to adopt the most progressive abortion laws in the country.
A ‘vessel’ for conservatives?
Mike Donohue, who is chair of the Shelburne Republicans and close to Scott, said Klar has catered his message to appeal to conservatives, but doesn’t think his campaign is “going anywhere.”
“It seems to me that Klar’s just the vessel who’s going to appeal to very conservative voices who are angry about such and such issue whether it’s, you know, the president or, social issues or immigration, or whatever it is,” he said.
Donohue, who was previously the chair of the Chittenden County Republicans, added that he’s heard from more conservative members of the party who had been dissatisfied with Scott, but warmed up to the governor during the Covid-19 crisis.
“They’re very impressed with the way that he’s handled the pandemic here in Vermont,” he said.
Klar, a Christian, has also worked as a pastor, and took over the First Congregational Church of Westfield between 2016 and 2019. He led nondenominational services, and raised money to help fund a school for orphaned children in Uganda.
Klar wasn’t raised Christian, but said that he found his faith when he was struggling with Lyme disease in the 1990s. On his website, he writes that when he began to pray, he found that his pain went away.
“I prayed to God to help me recover sufficiently that I might help others with my condition,” he wrote. “I already did a great deal of pro bono legal work, but this prayer was to help people in chronic pain — especially women, for whom this condition is quite common, and who are often dismissed by others.”
Rep. Vicki Strong, R-Albany, became a friend of Klar’s and after meeting him at a church in her town.
Like Klar, she believes that many Republicans are still disappointed by Scott’s support of the 2018 gun control measures and the 2019 abortion bill.
“I do hear it, and I heard a lot of sadness that they felt, in a way, betrayed by a governor that they thought he had promised some things,” she said referring to the two policies. “I mean how many times can a governor do that before he loses their vote or their good wishes.”
Strong said she’s undecided on who she will vote for in the upcoming primary. But she praised Klar as a hardworking person without political connections who was willing to step up and run for office, bringing “another voice to the table.”
“More than anything I think John will bring at least a discussion and a debate and give Vermonters options,” she said.
“And if they’ve been disgruntled with some things, then they have another option.”
Sawyer Loftus contributed reporting.
