Cris Ericson, who has long made sport of Vermont’s elections, seized on relaxed requirements of candidates amid Covid-19 and a largely empty Progressive ballot to nearly sweep the statewide races Tuesday for the state’s third party.
Ericson failed in her bid for the Progressive nomination for the U.S. House. Chris Brimmer, the party’s longtime secretary, beat her out in that race 254 votes to 235.
Progressives are also holding out hope that Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, a Progressive leader and the Democratic nominee for governor, could still pull out the Progressive nomination once all write-in votes are counted (Ericson is currently in the lead over Boots Wardinsky, another perennial candidate).
But in every other statewide race, from lieutenant governor to attorney general and auditor of accounts, the Progressive nomination went to Ericson, a political atheist who, according to the Progressive Party’s own executive director, has “some pretty explicitly racist views.”
“Certainly Progressives did not support her at all for any of these positions,” said Wronski, who speculated that those who did mark the ballot for Ericson were likely enthusiastic — though very uninformed — supporters of the Progressive Party, who simply did not know better.
Nonetheless, should Zuckerman lose his write-in nomination campaign, Ericson could be the Progressive Party’s best hope to get 5% of the vote in a statewide election, which is required to have “major party” status — giving the party its own ballot in primaries — in the next election.
“It is a joke,” Sen. Anthony Pollina, P/D-Washington, who chairs the Progressive Party, said of Ericson’s performance at the polls. “Although it’s just not very funny because I think it abuses the process.”
Pollina said the experience has been eye opening for the party. “People have said from here on out we have to fill the slate,” he said of post-election discussions, “so I think people are realizing that it’s not good to have an open ballot.”
Ericson did not respond to an email and multiple calls since Tuesday seeking comment. Liam Elder-Connors, a reporter for VPR, tweeted that Ericson was running as an independent because “she wasn’t treated well” by the Progressive Party in the primary.
Progressive leaders said they had confirmed that Ericson did indeed file as an independent in all of the races she won as a Progressive. But the party hasn’t heard directly whether Ericson intends to withdraw before the Aug. 22 deadline.
Josh Wronski, the party’s executive director, blamed the electoral system for making Ericson’s various campaigns possible. Because of Covid-19, lawmakers removed a requirement that candidates receive 500 signatures to enter a statewide contest.
“Cris would not have been able to get enough signatures,” Wronski said of a normal year. “I want to stress this was an abnormal election.” He also said the Progressive Party fell victim to a familiar political bind for Vermont’s left-of-Democratic party.
“It’s one of those damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations,” Wronski said Thursday. “People get angry if we file a candidate for every office because it potentially creates situations where we are running candidates against popular Democrats that Republicans are also running against.”
A strikingly similar situation emerged around the Republican ballot following the 2018 primary, when political gadfly H. Brooke Paige won six statewide primary races, mostly without competition.
Paige eventually agreed to let the GOP name new candidates in all of the races apart from secretary of state (he lost by a wide margin to Jim Condos in the general election).
Wronski said he’d like Ericson to do the same thing, though he added the party hadn’t spoken to her since the election.
“I think the difference is Brooke Paige is a Republican and Cris Ericson is clearly not a Progressive,” he said. “She’s in this to cause a stir. She doesn’t take elections seriously; this is all a big joke for her.”
Ericson released separate Youtube videos last month for each of her campaigns, laying out a different platform for each race, sometimes following the contours of Progressive priorities.
In her video for the U.S. House race, for example, she pushes for free health care and free higher education, which she wants to fund by breaking the cycle of “money laundering” in politics, in which taxpayers fund corporate research and development in sectors like pharmaceuticals and defense, but don’t share in the profit.
Ericson blames the corruption on the mutually beneficial relationship between politicians and big industry (like many a Progressive) but adds that her novel contribution is a plan to more forcefully assert the public rights to patents from publicly funded research.
In explaining her support for free health care for everyone, Ericson falsely points to “illegal aliens” as high-risk carriers of disease into the United States (who therefore need health care access to remain disease free, and keep society disease free).
“We need the free health care as long as there’s people coming into the United States of America. They could be bringing in any kind of disease” Ericson says.
“Unless we address the lowest common denominator in society, we don’t solve anything,” she adds, again apparently referencing undocumented immigrants.
“If you look at some of the stuff she said and talked about,” said Wronski, “she has some pretty explicitly racist views, which does not reflect our values in any way.”
In her video for the attorney general race, Ericson said she would sue the state for sending prisoners outside Vermont. In the video for auditor, she said she would host a television show on which people can share their stories of abuse at the hands of state agencies, which she would then follow up on. In her video for secretary of state, Ericson fumes that the Office of Professional Regulation (overseen by the Secretary of State) put a barber she knew out of business because it “didn’t like the way he was sweeping up the hair.”
During a previous run for governor, Ericson said she would host a game show in which prisoners compete for her pardon. She has also floated the idea of cleaning up algae blooms in Lake Carmi by sending out prisoners in rowboats to pull it out by hand.
