Updated Wednesday, Nov. 9, at 4:04 a.m.
Democratic U.S. House nominee Becca Balint made history Tuesday night, becoming Vermont’s first woman and first openly gay person elected to Congress.
Balint’s win brings Vermont in line with the rest of the nation. Until Tuesday, Vermont was the only state that had never elected a woman to its congressional delegation.
The Brattleboro Democrat beat Republican nominee and self-described independent Liam Madden. With all but one precinct reporting early Wednesday morning, according to the Secretary of State’s Office, Balint was leading Madden 60%-27%, with Libertarian nominee Ericka Redic picking up 4% of the vote.
Madden called Balint to concede Tuesday night, according to Balint’s campaign manager, Natalie Silver.
Shortly after that phone call, at the Vermont Democratic Party’s election night celebration in Burlington, Balint’s wife Elizabeth Wohl was met with voracious applause when she introduced Balint as the first woman to represent Vermont in Congress. Beaming, Balint thanked her family and campaign staff standing behind her and said, “If we had believed that change was impossible, I would not be standing here tonight.”
“Take note and take heart: Vermont is a place where kindness and integrity and courage matter,” Balint said. “Vermont is a place where the daughter of an immigrant dad and a working class mom can be the first woman and the first gay person to represent Vermont in the U.S. House of Representatives.”
Madden did not respond to multiple inquiries from VTDigger on Tuesday. At 10 p.m., Madden tweeted his congratulations to his opponent on her historic win: “Well done.”
Balint will replace U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, a Democrat, in Vermont’s sole House seat. Welch stepped aside in order to run for the U.S. Senate after longtime U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, announced he would retire at the end of his term. Welch won the Senate race handily on Tuesday.
He and Balint will serve in Vermont’s three-member congressional delegation alongside U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., whose current term expires in 2024.
After Balint prevailed in a hard-fought Democratic primary against Lt. Gov. Molly Gray and others in August, political observers largely saw her general election win as a foregone conclusion thanks to Vermont’s left-leaning electorate and Madden’s relative obscurity. A poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire and WCAX in October showed Balint with a commanding 57% to 19% lead over Madden. In that same poll, 56% of respondents said they didn’t know enough about Madden to have an opinion of him.
Though her victory speech Tuesday night was celebratory, Balint continually referenced a shadow that loomed over this year’s midterm elections across the country. The riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is still recent history, she noted, and candidates on the ballot across the country have sowed doubt about the validity of America’s elections. “These are such dark times,” Balint said. “It’s so easy to be cynical about politics.”
After her speech, she told VTDigger, “I never thought I would see the things in this country that we're seeing right now, where we have a major political party in which significant numbers of people do not believe in free and fair elections. I can't even believe I have to say that.”
“I feel like we have a short amount of time to bring us back from the edge. I do feel that. And I'm a little worried about what things are going to look like in the morning,” she continued. “But the work is the same. Either way, even if we hold the majority by a slim margin, the work is the same.”
Still, she made sure to remain optimistic in her speech.
“I know that Vermonters believe that politics can be different,” she said. “That's why we won.”
On debate stages and the campaign trail, Balint carved out progressive positions on issues such as abortion, the environment and universal health care, and she courted heavy-hitting progressives to back her campaign. Most notably, Sanders went all-in for Balint, endorsing her before the August primary, hosting a series of rallies across the state with her and leveraging his nationwide network of donors to back Balint’s campaign.
But Balint, a self-described peacemaker, has also flexed her prior experience in the Vermont Legislature as evidence of her ability to work across the aisle and compromise on hot-button issues. First elected to the state Senate in 2014, Balint quickly rose through the ranks to become Senate president pro tempore in 2021.
She helped form the task force that would eventually unstick the state government’s impasse on its fraught pension system. And when Republican Gov. Phil Scott vetoed the task force’s solution this year, the Legislature, under the leadership of Balint and House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, unanimously overrode his veto.
Balint also shepherded through the Legislature Vermont’s robust legal protections for abortions, including Article 22, a first-in-the-nation amendment enshrining the right to reproductive health care in the state constitution, which voters approved resoundingly Tuesday. While some colleagues did not see the same urgency for abortion legislation, Balint and other lawmakers correctly predicted that the end of federal abortion protections was near.
Balint hasn’t been without her controversies. Over the course of this year’s primary campaign, Gray took shots at Balint for declining to disavow spending by large political action committees, or PACs, and her campaign’s apparent winking at them with a tactic known as redboxing. Ahead of the August election, PACs poured more than a million dollars into the state in a pro-Balint advertising blitz.
It was revealed only after the primary that the LGBTQ Victory Fund, the largest driver of that spending, was predominantly bankrolled by a $1.1 million donation from Nishad Singh, a top executive at the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Balint has maintained that she was not aware of Singh’s influence until it became public, and that the PAC spending on her behalf was conducted without her approval. Singh’s donation and Victory Fund’s subsequent spending on Balint’s behalf were, according to current campaign finance law, legal maneuvers.
Madden, Balint’s chief opponent in the general election, was a vocal critic of PACs’ influence on the House race in the run-up to Tuesday. But he, too, sparked his own campaign fundraising controversy. Weeks before Election Day, Madden described in detail on a live radio show an apparent straw donor scheme he conducted to inflate his donation numbers so he could qualify for candidate debates.
According to his recounting of events, Madden funneled thousands of dollars from his wife’s business bank account to family members, including his toddler son, then asked those family members to donate the money back to his campaign. Campaign finance legal experts told VTDigger that the sequence of events was a “textbook” case of utilizing straw donors, which is illegal. Several groups and people, including Madden’s former GOP primary rival Redic, said they plan to file complaints with the Federal Election Commission against Madden. Days before the election, Redic called on Madden to withdraw.
Though he won the Republican primary in August, Madden self-identifies as an independent and a staunch opponent of the two-party system. Since launching his initial bid, he said he only ran in the Republican primary in order to gain name recognition early in Vermont’s election cycle, and promised to rescind the Republican nomination should he clinch it in August and file instead as an independent.
After failing to file on time with the Secretary of State’s Office as an independent, Madden ultimately held onto the Republican nomination, much to the Vermont Republican Party’s chagrin. The GOP swore off providing his campaign institutional support because Madden refused to commit to caucus with Republicans in the event he won.