All four candidates competing in the Democratic primary for Vermont’s sole U.S. House seat met Tuesday night for the first time to discuss housing, discrimination and voting rights.
The virtual forum, hosted by the left-leaning advocacy organization Rights & Democracy, was the first to host the candidates since former congressional staffer Sianay Chase Clifford entered the race last week. She joined Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, D-Windham; Lt. Gov. Molly Gray; and Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden, in seeking the seat being vacated by U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt.
Rights & Democracy, which is based in Vermont and New Hampshire, plans to endorse a candidate in June, following a vote by its members. The primary is Aug. 9.
The candidates have yet to distinguish themselves from one another on major policy issues and have largely embraced the national progressive movement’s priorities, including Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. And in opening statements to the roughly 150 participants tuning in Tuesday night, they largely sought to differentiate themselves based on their experience and life stories.
Balint told audience members that “the first thing that I want you to know about me is that I love people. And I bring that sense of connection to all that I do as a teacher, as a parent, as a strong progressive Democrat, as a coalition builder and as an advocate for working people.”
The first openly gay person to lead the Vermont Senate, Balint said that, growing up, she knew what it was like “to not know if you can trust the people in your life that are supposed to have your back.”
“People want to know, essentially, that somebody has their back,” she said. “And that’s why I got into public service.”
Ram Hinsdale, who was the first woman of color elected to the Vermont Senate, said she “grew up sweeping peanut shells off the floor of my Indian immigrant father and Jewish American mother’s Irish pub.”
Her family lived the American dream, she said, but also the “American nightmare” after the family business went under.
“My father died holding a catering tray in his hands at a Silicon Valley Gala,” she said. “So the fight for working people and the dignity of people to be able to retire is extremely personal for me.”
Chase Clifford said she grew up, like so many Vermonters, in a family that wouldn’t have been able to afford a $1,000 emergency.
“Every semester I dodged calls from my university’s debt collector about unpaid tuition while my friends covered me for meals I couldn’t afford,” she said. “These aren’t abstract stories. This is my real life.”
Gray, who was raised in Newbury, said she lived all across the state, abroad and in Washington, D.C., where she went to work for Welch as a young graduate of the University of Vermont soon after he was first elected to the U.S. House.
“I know what it’s like to build an office from scratch and to work in Washington in the halls of Congress,” she said. “I’ll be ready to go on day one.”
Lisa Black, a Winooski resident who became disabled in 2016 after multiple surgeries, told the candidates her landlord served her with eviction papers — for no cause — after she asked them to make her unit ADA-accessible and to fix code violations. How would they hold landlords accountable, she asked, and ensure that Vermonters are able to live in safe, healthy and accessible living conditions without risk of eviction?
Gray answered that Congress needed to invest in landlords — and enforcement. She said she would work to fully fund and staff the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, which investigates housing violations.
“I think the other important piece is that we need to crack down on evictions,” she said, pointing to the Eviction Crisis Act, which she said “would fund local governments to create landlord tenant community courts and increase social services for tenants.”
Chase Clifford said the country needed to establish a national right to counsel in eviction proceedings and a tenant’s bill of rights, in addition to a national fund for tenant legal representation and housing advocates.
Balint said Congress needs to push for a federal just cause eviction standard, expand the Fair Housing Act and to pass the Equality Act, which would expand federal civil rights laws to include LGBTQ+ people. Like Gray, she also emphasized giving enforcement agencies the resources to go after discriminatory landlords, and, similarly to Chase Clifford, Balint said a right to civil Gideon — or right to counsel — was necessary.
But the pro tem added that the federal government also needed to invest heavily in block grants to simply build more housing.
“We know housing-first works. We know low barriers to housing works. We should be leaning into things that work and not trying to reinvent the wheel,” she said.
Ram Hinsdale said she had championed a just cause standard in the Vermont Senate. She spoke at length about a bill she wrote when she was a young renter and serving in the Vermont House, after her own landlord had unjustly withheld her security deposit.
Asked by Burlington resident and Community College of Vermont student Debra Davis whether they supported dissolving the electoral college, all four candidates enthusiastically answered yes. Three — Gray, Balint and Chase Clifford — also highlighted the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, championed by U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, as a key reform as well as the For the People Act.
Ram Hinsdale also highlighted her work to help found Emerge Vermont, which trains Democratic women to run for office, and the Bright Leadership Institute, which does the same for Vermonters of color.
“Others lost opportunity and, in some cases, lost their lives for my right to vote and my ability to lead and serve. That has never been lost on me,” she said. “And it’s why I have run for office and turned around and worked to help others run for office as well.”
Balint also argued that Vermont’s voting laws were a “real model” for the nation and added a passionate plea to “get big money out of politics.”
“Let’s pull the curtain back for a minute. What all of us are doing right now — we’re all on the freakin’ phone for hours a day trying to raise money for our campaigns,” she said. “It’s broken. It’s fundamentally broken.”
The forum’s audience likely consisted primarily of Democratic primary voters. But in her closing remarks, Gray looked toward the general election and warned that Vermonters couldn’t take it for granted that a Democrat would keep the seat.
“Republicans nationally are looking at Vermont and thinking, ‘This is a small media buy, an extremely popular Republican governor’ — and they can pick up the seat,” she said. “I’m also the only only candidate who’s run and won statewide.”
Chase Clifford, who worked in the office of U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., for a year, said she knows how hard it was to turn big ideas into concrete policy.
“We can do hard things but we cannot individualize our way out of collective and communal crisis,” she said. “I believe that we can have a future to be hopeful about, but with so much at stake, we have to have people who are bold enough and brave enough to fight for structural solutions.”
Balint said she once thought it would never be possible for her to marry her spouse and that Vermont — the first state to introduce civil unions — had “at times been the conscience of the nation.”
“What this moment needs right now is Vermont to lead once again, with a person of integrity with the skills to do the hard work in the quiet rooms, long after hours. Someone who can build coalitions to deliver lasting change,” she said.
Ram Hinsdale concluded with a shot at Balint, saying pointedly that she did not do her work “in the quiet rooms after hours.”
“I do the work on the Statehouse steps with you. I do the work in the streets. I do the work side by side with working Vermonters and people struggling, and that’s where the work needs to be done,” she said.
“I am someone who can dream big and also deliver on those bold promises,” Ram Hinsdale continued. “And the only way I can do that is with you, and together with labor leaders and climate leaders — who have already endorsed this campaign — we will take Washington by storm.”