Theo Wells-Spackman is a Report for America corps member who reports for VTDigger.
Early in their respective paths to primary day, state Senate hopefuls Elaine Haney and Nikhil Goyal met with veteran journalist and former Senate candidate Stewart Ledbetter. In a closely watched 2024 Democratic primary in the Chittenden Central district, Ledbetter’s well-resourced campaign failed to boost him past the district’s three incumbents.
In separate meetings, the two new primary challengers talked strategy — and money — with the moderate Democrat, who told VTDigger that in hindsight, he should perhaps have run as an independent.
“You just have a lot of things working against you when you’re a challenger,” Ledbetter said. “And you’re in a very low-turnout primary where, you know, the people who turn out tend to be more extreme.”
Goyal told Ledbetter he expected to set a Senate campaign fundraising record, well above the latter’s roughly $70,000 in 2024. With mail costs rising and online advertising options expanding, the expense of campaigning is high, Goyal said in an interview. And when it came to name recognition, he was starting far behind the former TV news personality, he added.
In advance of a campaign finance reporting deadline earlier this month, Goyal did set that record, with nearly $138,000 in contributions — already the largest resource pool of any legislative campaign on file with the Vermont secretary of state. Haney reported raising about $53,000, which is more than double the funds of either incumbent in the race.
Fellow legislative hopefuls boasting unusually well-financed campaigns in other districts include Hannah Sessions in Addison County, who reported roughly $53,000 in contributions, and Ben Brickner in a crowded Windsor County primary, with a total of almost $65,000.
It’s difficult to point to a statewide trend toward costlier campaigns this year. But eyeing the cluster of well-resourced challengers, some lawmakers have expressed concern at what growing war chests in legislative races might mean for local politics.
“It made me worry that we are entering a new time of financial spending in Vermont races that we have not experienced at this Senate level,” said Sen. Becca White, D-Windsor, who faces a well-funded test from Brickner. If money — or connections to it — becomes too central in local campaigns, White said in an interview, she’s concerned that some Vermonters will cease to see a feasible path to public office.
Brickner, an attorney and chair of the Pomfret Selectboard, said that more than two-thirds of his contributions came from inside the district, and that those funds will enable crucial outreach alongside his intensive canvassing efforts.
“This is what broad, local support looks like,” he said in an email.
Lachlan Francis, the state’s Democratic party chair, said he shares concerns over rising costs of advertising to some extent. Vermont remains a cheaper place to run a legislative campaign than nearly any other state, he added, though the nature of Vermont’s relatively low-paid citizen legislature already makes it inaccessible to many residents.
Chris Graff, a longtime Vermont journalist and broadcaster, said he has seen more money flow into Vermont politics in general over the last decade. But while funds can lend credibility to a campaign, he said, the role in a candidate’s success can be difficult to predict.
Primaries are particularly tricky to influence, Graff said. Relatively low turnout means it’s more difficult to find voters — and those who vote are often politically engaged already.
“Money in Vermont, whether you’re talking about legislative or statewide races, doesn’t necessarily translate into winning,” Graff said. When it comes to building the right kind of name recognition, he added, “nobody really knows the answer.”
‘Meet the voters where they are’
Goyal and Haney are two of the three largest fundraisers in the 2026 legislative election cycle, and the Chittenden Central Senate district is again becoming one of the most fiercely contested primaries in the state.
The race was blown open in February by the unexpected announcement that Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, would not seek reelection. Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky, a Progressive/Democrat, and Democratic Sen. Martine Gulick are the incumbents running in the three-seat district. No Republicans are running, according to the Secretary of State’s Office’s data.
For Goyal, a Democrat/Progressive, the fundraising push has been necessary. The University of Vermont adjunct sociology professor and former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said he’s knocked on more than 4,000 doors in recent months and is preparing a round of digital advertisements in the coming weeks. Filings show purchases totaling nearly $25,000 for mail services and literature cards from Seattle-based Moxie Media, as well as $2,500 in local newspaper advertising.
“I’m raising the sufficient funds in order to run a strong campaign,” Goyal said in an interview last week. “I would argue that nobody is working harder in this race than me in terms of reaching voters.”
Goyal does intend to use some funds for other purposes, he said, such as supporting other Democratic legislative candidates in Vermont and sponsoring bus trips to Canada for Vermonters to purchase cheaper pharmaceutical drugs.
Both Goyal and Haney — a “small p” progressive Democrat — said newcomers to races like this one must overcome an inherent disadvantage.
“Your name recognition is less than the incumbents’,” Haney said. “You need to meet the voters where they are, and that requires making your presence known.”
Though Haney has raised less than half of Goyal’s haul, she still has more than double the campaign resources held by either incumbent. Haney, a former Essex Junction City Council member and county planning commissioner, said she was on track to execute her strategy, which has included hiring a campaign manager and investing at least $7,000 in digital and print advertising.
“I have budgeted my campaign very carefully,” she said in an interview between canvassing stops. “I think we should be raising what we need to run, and not a penny more.”
For Haney, it’s not just about the money raised but where it’s coming from. Goyal’s reports show a large portion of his contributions totals are from out-of-state residents — a number of whom gave $1,940, Vermont’s maximum for individual donations — and that he has held campaign events outside Vermont.
Goyal said 240 of his more than 400 donations have come from Vermonters, including part-time residents or new arrivals who might be counted by campaign finance systems as living outside the state. He attributed his out-of-state support to widespread interest in his progressive agenda and support from across the country after his endorsement by the national advocacy organization Indian American Impact. Personal connections also accounted for some contributions, he said.
“Not a single dollar from corporate PACs. Not a single dollar of self-funding,” Goyal said in an email.
Gulick, one of the Democratic incumbents in the district, said she had been watching the fundraising totals closely.
“There is a huge disparity between how much money I’m raising and how much money is being raised by the top fundraiser,” she said. “It will be interesting to see how that pays off in the vote counts.”
Vyhovsky agreed, adding that this race marks a pivotal period of turnover for her constituents.
“It’s going to be a transformative moment for the Senate, and for the district,” she said of Baruth’s departure.
‘Standard of excess’
Baruth, who was elected to the Senate by Chittenden County voters eight times, said his district has a history of moneyed Senate races. (He himself was repeatedly successful with relatively scant spending, a luxury he largely attributes to “the power of incumbency.”)
Republican Skip Vallee, Baruth pointed out, set a “standard of excess” by spending roughly $123,000 (approaching $240,000 when adjusted for inflation) on a Chittenden Senate campaign in 2000. Vallee, who owns R.L. Vallee, the Vermont fuel company that operates Maplefields, contributed $60,000 toward his total from his own bank account, Seven Days reported. (Vallee did not respond to an interview request for this story.)
“Vallee’s run was so incredibly wasteful,” Baruth said, recalling an avalanche of glossy attack mailers leading up to the candidate’s eventual defeat in the general election. “He didn’t do very well.”
At a certain point, Baruth added, local candidates who raise as much as Goyal eventually run out of productive ways to spend huge sums of money.
To be sure, Vallee was a Republican running in a district where, Baruth said, candidates who are “outspoken in their left-of-center views” have historically broken through with the electorate more easily.
“Money can’t buy you identification with the voters,” Baruth said.
In a public forum last month, all four Democrats outlined their priorities differently.
Goyal said he was running on universal primary care, and supports rehabilitating Vermont’s dilapidated housing stock, as well as limiting the power of “big tech and AI.”
Haney agreed that the state should “explore” universal primary care, and underlined her commitment to smoothing the regulatory road for housing development to ease affordability concerns for constituents.
Vyhovsky, who was first elected to the Senate in 2022, also emphasized her focus on affordability issues and strengthening the state’s housing supply, as well as her attention to protections for immigrant communities and victims of abuse.
Gulick, a former high school teacher who also first reached the Senate in 2022, highlighted her opposition to last year’s sweeping education reform bill, and her work on this year’s law facilitating voluntary district mergers rather than mandatory ones.
‘An economy being built’
Graff, who has observed Vermont politics for decades, said he’s seen drastic shifts in how campaign money is used.
“Advertising has changed pretty dramatically,” he said.
Graff remembers the campaign that then-Chittenden County State’s Attorney Patrick Leahy ran against Republican congressman Dick Mallory for U.S. Senate in 1974.
“They knew it was going to be close,” Graff said. “But the week before the election, the Leahy campaign bought 30-minute blocks of television time.”
In the evenings before Vermonters went to the polls, Leahy replaced popular shows like “Jeopardy!” with a half-hour documentary about his life, his family and his work. Graff said historians and analysts agree that the move made all the difference, securing Leahy the win that saw him become the state’s longest-serving senator.
But now, Graff said, strategists often consider television ads close to worthless for Vermont elections. He’s also seen a “new and renewed emphasis on social media,” he said — though the effectiveness of such advertisements may still be unclear.
Chittenden County is something of an outlier, Graff believes, still retaining a legitimate market for some of the older media strategies, like print newspaper advertisements. But for local elections, he argued that door-to-door canvassing is still the most effective way to reach voters.
Legislative hopefuls say another factor may be impacting candidates’ planning and budgeting for campaigns this year: Candidates are being inundated, to a much greater extent than before, with offers of goods and services to support their election.
“I was getting emails, phone calls, texts from consultants of all kinds — mail houses, digital ad firms,” Haney said. “None of them from Vermont.”
White, the Windsor County senator, agreed. She’s had offers for everything from opposition research to merchandise and magnetic car signs.
“I would argue that there is an economy being built around our public elections,” she said.
While it’s not clear that such outreach has influenced spending this year, White thinks that incorporating elaborate merchandise and outside help for legislative campaigns is not a productive direction for the state’s political focus.
Baruth, who agreed that such appeals seem to have intensified, said that low-cost polling schemes could occasionally be useful for candidates in such races. But in general, he said, the wave of communication — which he guessed was in part due to artificial intelligence-driven outreach from political firms — does not offer anything useful.
“I think Vermont is on the radar now as a place where legislative races are becoming more expensive and thus are opportunities for consultants,” said Graff in an email. “Gone are the days when a candidate could get by spending $50 for postage or a few hundred dollars on a flyer.”
