“Electric,” “indescribable,” “joyful” — these are the words some of Vermont’s delegates at the Democratic National Convention used in interviews with VTDigger to describe this week’s festivities in Chicago.
“I know you’re calling me to ask for descriptions, but I am having a difficult time putting into words the sheer energy, enthusiasm and joy,” one of Vermont’s elected delegates, Burlington resident and progressive strategist Arshad Hasan, told VTDigger in a phone call Thursday morning. “I’m trying not to swear right now.”
It’s been a whirlwind month in presidential campaigning since incumbent President Joe Biden took the unprecedented step of forsaking his Democratic nomination to once again face former President Donald Trump at the polls in November. Into his place stepped Vice President Kamala Harris, and Vermont’s 24-member delegation quickly fell in line to unanimously support their party’s new nominee.
By Thursday night, Harris took to the DNC stage to accept her nomination — a historic first, as a woman of color leading a major party ticket — and delivered a 37-minute speech outlining to voters her biography, as well as her vision for the presidency.
In Vermont — which delivered Biden his largest margin of victory in the 2020 election, with a 35-point lead ahead of Trump — voters appear to be on the same page. According to a poll of Vermont eligible voters released by the University of New Hampshire this week, 67% of respondents said they planned to vote for Harris this fall, to Trump’s 27%.
If those numbers hold, Harris could crush Trump in an even more devastating loss in Vermont than Biden did in 2020. Three percent of respondents said they would vote for independent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who qualified for Vermont’s presidential ballot earlier this month — the New York Times reported on Thursday that the independent is expected to end his campaign and throw his support behind Trump.
The Green Mountain State Poll, conducted by the UNH Survey Center between Aug. 15 and Aug. 19, surveyed 988 individuals and had a 3.1% margin of error.
“Here’s the reality that we all knew, but we didn’t know what to do about it all: The polling showed that people did not want a rematch of Biden versus Trump,” U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., who was the first Democratic senator to call on Biden to step down from the race, told VTDigger from Chicago this week. “People thought it was time to turn the page and have new candidates, both on the Democratic side and the Republican side.”
“So when the president stepped aside — and that, of course, occurred after the disastrous debate,” Welch continued, “it just unleashed all this energy that was there, but wasn’t activated.”
That energy seemed to be concentrated inside Chicago’s United Center stadium this week, where celebrities like Oprah and Lil Jon made cameos at the convention, and delegates heard impassioned speeches from high-profile politicians from around the country.
One of those speakers was Vermont’s own U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats and twice ran a progressive campaign for president. During his speech on Tuesday night, Sanders ticked through his usual leftward talking points — promoting universal health care, taxing the rich and getting “big money out of our political process” — but he also touted the achievements of the Biden-Harris White House over the past three and a half years.
In particular, he highlighted the White House’s work at the start of Biden’s term in 2021, when the United States was “a nation suffering — a nation frightened — and people (were) looking to their government for support.” It was then that the White House and Congress pushed through the American Rescue Plan Act to provide that support, Sanders said.
“When the political will is there, government can effectively deliver for the people of our country,” Sanders said. “And now we need to summon that will again, because too many of our fellow Americans are struggling every day to just get by — to put food on the table, to pay the rent, and to get the health care they need.”
For Hasan, after years of progressive activism, it was significant to see Sanders hold such a prominent spot on the DNC stage — and to hear other speakers hit the same notes.
“Whether or not he gets the credit for it, it has now become clear that the ideas that he was championing are perhaps much more popular than many of the previous insiders … thought could be popular,” Hasan said. “He’s a major figure in the minds of people as a progressive, but he’s not alone in this, necessarily. The voices that we saw up there — it wasn’t just Sen. Sanders espousing all of this stuff.”
According to Nikhil Goyal — a former senior policy advisor for Sanders and one of Vermont’s Democratic delegates — one of those standout voices was vice presidential nominee and current Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
“It’s just been really fulfilling to watch Democrats proudly stand for working people and their interests,” Goyal told VTDigger Thursday morning. “I thought Tim Walz’s speech last night really hit that chord — that Democrats are for free, universal school meals, and expanding Medicare, and lowering prescription drug prices.”
And on the other side, Goyal continued, Republicans believe in the opposite: “hungry children, and higher prescription drug prices, and price gouging, and denying health care and reproductive rights to millions of Americans.”
“I think the contrast that was made on the stage each and every night has been crystal clear,” he said.
In the eyes of U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., the juxtaposition between the Democratic National Convention and last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee has been stark. Just look at the attendees, she said.
“First and foremost, just the visual image of when you look around the arena here in Chicago — it looks like America. Every single group you can imagine is represented here in this arena,” Balint told VTDigger from Chicago this week. “Just look at the roll call from the RNC: It is a lot of white people. It’s so stark when you see it. And it is wonderful to be in this incredible sea of humanity.”
Come Wednesday, when it came time for states to cast their delegate votes (simply a formality, as the official votes were already cast virtually ahead of the convention), Vermont Democratic Party Chair David Glidden focused Vermont’s brief national spotlight on public education.
With the twangy guitar of Vermonter and singer-songwriter Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” playing in the background, Glidden boasted that, “Vermont knows the value of public education. We even have a teacher as our Congresswoman.” Beside him, Balint — a former middle school social studies teacher — waved gleefully.
“And in 1777, we were the first state to place public education in our Constitution,” Glidden said. “As someone with significant learning disabilities, I know the value of investing in every single child. We are proud to call Vermont home, and we are proud to cast our 24 votes for Kamala Harris, because we are not going back.”
“We are not going back” — a slogan, borne of Harris’s campaign, has rung through the United Center all week. To Hasan, it’s a dramatic difference from Trump’s now famous slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
Hasan recalled growing up queer in Grand Forks, North Dakota, “absolutely certain I could never be married, or have a family, or be out and proud or safe ever in my entire life.” Instead, in the past 25 years, he said the U.S. has “made incredible progress.”
But for Hasan, Trump’s slogan begs the question: “Every time I hear ‘Make America Great Again,’ people like me have to wonder, ‘When do you mean? What do you mean that you want to get rid of now?’”
“And when I hear, ‘We won’t go back,’ it is very, very clear that I do not want to go back to that scared little teenage kid,” Hasan said, his voice breaking.
Amid the RNC’s festivities last month, convention goers touted a message of “unity” coming from Trump. But according to Welch, that sense of unity wasn’t around Republican ideals, but around Trump, himself.
“The proud legacy of the Republican Party has been hijacked by the personality cult of Donald Trump,” Welch said. “It’s unfortunate for our country, because we need a good, solid Republican Party.
In contrast, Balint pointed to Biden’s decision to step away from the nomination and his declining, “from his perspective, the greatest job in the world.” It was a moment that “shifted the paradigm about how we could look, not just at this race, but at the country as a whole,” she said.
Now is a time in American politics that, according to Welch, bears resemblance to the 1960s, marked by the tumult of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement — and those who resisted it — and a string of political assassinations. It was also during those years when Welch, himself, worked as a community organizer in Chicago.
In 1968, he was among the anti-war protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in the very same city where it’s being held now, he said. This year, he’s inside the building.
“There was this feeling then that the center would not hold, and things were totally falling apart in almost a despairing sense,” Welch said.
Now, Welch said, “communities are frayed” by crises of affordability, education, health care and social media.
“That challenge, in some ways now, is similar to the challenge we had for different reasons in the 60s,” Welch said. “And that is: How do you have a politics that helps strengthen the bonds that can unite us? … I see that continuing to be a struggle, but there’s enormous forces pulling us apart that we have to contend with.”
According to Balint, November’s general election will offer voters an opportunity to “turn the page.”
“What we have known intuitively for a long time has now been cracked open, which is, Americans don’t want to hate each other,” Balint said. “Americans don’t want to demonize each other. We don’t want to feel uncomfortable around our neighbors. It is not good for us, personally, emotionally, psychologically.”
At this week’s convention, though, Balint said there’s a feeling of joy. “Even when we’re talking about hard things,” she said, “people do feel like there is a sense of coming together as a nation.”
Now the challenge is carrying that energy out of the convention center.
“We’ve got 11 weeks now,” Balint said. “That’s it.”
