Vermont’s state chapters of the Republican and Democratic parties could both see new leadership next month after the parties hold their biennial reorganization meetings.
Paul Dame, the incumbent chair of the Vermont Republican Party, is running for a third term but facing a challenge from a somewhat unconventional opponent: a sitting state senator. Sen. Russ Ingalls, R-Essex, is vying to lead the party with a pitch that it could do more to recruit down-ballot candidates and deepen its ties with younger voters.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Jim Ramsey — who’s served as interim party chair since February — said Wednesday that he will not be seeking the job on a permanent basis. Ramsey was elected to the role after former chair David Glidden resigned.
“Over the course of the past few months, my work commitments outside of the VDP have been increasing, and much of it is occurring away from Vermont, particularly in Washington, DC.,” Ramsey wrote in an email to other party leaders last week.
Vermont Democrats will elect a new chair on Nov. 15, while the GOP will elect a new leader on Nov. 8. Both chairs will be chosen by the members of each party’s state committees, which largely consist of delegates selected at the county level.
The Democratic state committee is slated to have about 45 members this year, while the GOP state committee will likely have about 110, party leaders said.
‘A winning team’
Dame was first elected GOP chair in 2021, and he was reelected to the two-year post in 2023. Like Ingalls, he said he’s running to build on sweeping gains the party made in the Vermont House and Senate in last fall’s elections that dismantled Democratic supermajorities in both chambers.
For Dame’s part, though, he thinks a leadership change won’t help win more seats. He acknowledged that the party’s gains were largely thanks to campaigning by Republican Gov. Phil Scott, though believes his relationship with the governor played a role, too.
“I think when you’ve got a winning team, you want to be very careful about mixing things up,” said Dame, who lives in St. George and runs a retirement planning company.
Despite those gains, recent history gives Republicans some reason to be wary. During the last midterm elections in 2022, the party lost substantial ground to Democrats after winning a handful of new seats in 2020 — albeit, not the wave they won last year. It’s not entirely clear what impact President Donald Trump’s popularity, or the popularity of policies backed by Trump’s GOP allies in Congress, might have on the 2026 race.
The state Republican Party has also faced a scandal over the past two weeks that could factor into the chair race. State Sen. Sam Douglass, R-Orleans, resigned from his seat after he was exposed in a Politico report as a member of a group chat with other young Republicans from around the country that exchanged racial slurs and other derogatory messages.
Gov. Scott issued a press release calling for Douglass to resign the evening of the day the Politico report was published. The following day, Ingalls was the lead signatory on a statement signed by several Northeast Kingdom legislators calling for the same, adding, “these comments have no place within our society as a whole and will not be tolerated.”
Douglass formally submitted notice of his resignation to Vermont’s Senate secretary, John Bloomer, on Wednesday.
For his part, Dame had not immediately called for Douglass to resign from his Senate seat. He called the group chat “shocking and grotesque” in a statement the following day but suggested that remarks attributed to Douglass in the Politico story were not bigoted or racist. Hours later, however, the executive committee of the state GOP issued a press release with a “full, complete retraction” of Dame’s statement.
“The Vermont Republican Party (“VTGOP”) Executive Committee stands united with Governor Phil Scott and the Republican Senate and House leadership and calls for the immediate resignation of Senator Sam Douglass,” they wrote in the release.
The party’s executive committee includes Dame as well as the party’s vice chair, treasurer and secretary, along with Republican state legislators and other members appointed by the larger state committee, according to the party’s governing rules.
In an interview on Vermont Public’s midday radio show, Vermont Edition, on Monday, Dame, who served in the House from 2015 to 2017, pushed back on the notion that his values were not aligned with those of the rest of the committee. He said he was hesitant to jump to conclusions about Douglass’ intentions, and that he issued the statement he felt comfortable with given all the information he had at the time.
“Part of what I’ve been trying to do in my term as chair is, trying to find what is a standard that we can hold all of our elected officials to — and, how do we begin to apply that equally, in a nonpartisan way?” he said on the radio.
A senator’s challenge
Ingalls has served in the state Senate since 2019 and currently chairs the chamber’s Agriculture Committee. He is well-known as one of the chamber’s most conservative voices.
Ingalls faced criticism from the state’s Democratic Party in April when he was one of a handful of members of the chamber to vote against a resolution condemning the arrest of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student activist and years-long Upper Valley resident, by masked federal immigration agents in Colchester. The Columbia University student, who was a prominent leader of pro-Palestinian protests on campus, was later ordered released by a Vermont federal judge.
To be sure, Ingalls also represents some of the state’s most politically conservative areas. In Essex County, which makes up most of his district, 55% of voters supported Trump in the 2024 presidential election, compared with 33% on average statewide.
“I have spoken to far too many of you who feel disenfranchised with the direction of our Party and its leadership,” Ingalls said in a social media post announcing his candidacy last week, a day before the Politico story was published. “I hear you and commit to making sure that your values and ideals are reflected in the Party that you love.”
In addition to serving in the Legislature, Ingalls owns a real estate business and operates a group of radio stations in and around his Northeast Kingdom district. Over the summer, Ingalls decided to switch the brief newscasts that play at the top of the hour on his stations from stories produced by Associated Press or the major broadcasters ABC, CBS and NBC to Fox News.
Dame, in an interview, questioned whether Ingalls would be able to devote his time fully to serving as party chair in addition to all those different roles.
“I think that he’s too important in the role that he’s in to have his attention divided with everything that comes with this job,” Dame said, referring to Ingalls’ Senate seat. Republicans have a minority of seats but enough to sustain vetoes by Gov. Scott.
For a moment this month, a third candidate also had his hat in the ring for state GOP chair: Joe Gervais, the current chair of the Bennington County Republicans who has run, unsuccessfully, for both the House and Senate. Gervais announced his bid for chair on Oct. 2, but last week, he reneged on that idea and endorsed Ingalls’ bid instead, he said in an email.
Ingalls did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
A new Democratic chair
While Republicans will be focused on maintaining — and attempting to boost — the number of seats they have in both chambers next year, Ramsey, the outgoing Democratic chair, said his party will focus on messaging to voters that characterizes Scott, and other Republican leaders, as an inadequate safeguard against the Trump administration.
It’s not clear yet whether any of Vermont’s statewide Democratic incumbents — namely, Treasurer Mike Pieciak or Attorney General Charity Clark — will announce a bid for governor for 2026. Scott has not said yet whether he plans to seek what would be his sixth term in the office.
Ramsey said his increasing work commitments in Washington, D.C., stem largely from his and his wife’s work with organizations that advocate for research on brain health. He said that work has taken on new urgency amid the Trump administration’s efforts to slash public health research. The couple plans to move to Washington, D.C. full time but keep a second home in Manchester, Ramsey said.
Glidden, the former Democratic chair, announced he was resigning from the job in November 2024, triggering a midcycle election for the role. Ramsey beat out Andy Julow, who was appointed to a state Senate seat in May 2024 but then lost in the general election that fall to a Republican challenger. The party chair vote was 38-7, according to Ramsey.
Julow said in a text message Wednesday that he does not plan to seek the job again. Ramsey said he wasn’t immediately aware of other candidates who had publicly declared their intention to run.
Ramsey appeared to receive at least some scrutiny during his time as chair over fundraising efforts. A report from the Vermont Democratic Party’s treasurer last month, which was reviewed by VTDigger, stated that staff added a specific line for party fundraising tied to the chair. Between January and August, the chair had raised “$0 against a budgeted (expected) revenue of $6500,” the report states. The line was added “in response to requests for more fundraising transparency,” it states.
Ramsey said he was aware of that line item but pushed back on the idea that it was a criticism of his work as chair. He said he did not think it painted a complete picture of the work he’d done since taking on the role. He compared the $6,500 figure to the party’s total revenue over the same time period which, per the report, was about $227,000, saying the former would have been a small drop in the bucket.
“I’ve done a lot of work with emails, letters, meetings, calls, other stuff,” Ramsey said. “There has been quite a bit of activity on my part.”
