According to Reed Webster, the vice chair of the county's Democratic committee, a Republican neighbor had an epiphany.
“He said, 'I know what the problem is. Vermont is the most liberal state in the union. Windham County is the most liberal county in the state. We live in the most liberal place in the county',” recounts Webster, a gregarious road crew worker who is using some of his vacation days to staff the party's storefront in Bellows Falls.
The most-liberal-state-in-the-union designation is credible by many yardsticks, including the state's landmark civil unions law granting rights to gay and lesbian couples, its vigorous environmental protection laws, and local, grassroots political movements like the calls to impeach or indict President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
An analysis of state voting patterns in election cycles going back to 1998 shows Democratic and Progressive candidates in Windham County receiving a higher margin of votes than they do statewide - a margin of at least 10 percent. Voters in three Brattleboro precincts routinely voted even higher.
The once-staunchly-Republican political landscape in Vermont has changed into something more unpredictable.
A large left-of-center population hasn't led to a left-wing citizenry falling into political lockstep. Rather, it has made room for more diverse points of view on that end of the spectrum, adding a new constellation of complications to the campaign process.
The Vermont Progressive Party, which originated in Burlington with support for the mayoral candidacy of socialist Bernie Sanders, now Vermont's U.S. senator, has played a major role this season, with Anthony Pollina declaring his candidacy for governor under that party's label before he broke ranks - amicably, he says - to run as an independent.
Six Progressives serve in the legislature, and the party has fielded 15 candidates for races that range from Burlington City Council to Congress.
Ben Mitchell of Westminster, a socialist and a Liberty Union Party candidate, will vie for the lieutenant governor's office against Republican incumbent Brian Dubie and their Democratic challenger, Brattleboro lawyer Tom Costello
What follows are a few vignettes of the election season from citizens and candidates from the traditional Democrat/Republican dichotomy and those who seek to shatter the hold of the two-party system - vignettes that in their small way illustrate some of the unique aspects of contemporary politics in Vermont.
* * *
Surrounded by lawn signs for local, state, and national Democrats, Reed Webster and Lamont “Monty” Barnett sit at a banquet table loaded with piles of brochures, stickers, literature, and voter registration forms as another volunteer breezes back and forth to get the kinks out of the loaner computer.
The traditionally ragtag campaign decor stands in contrast to the upper-crusty architectural detailing in the lobby of the old Hotel Windham in Bellows Falls. Under the watchful, two-dimensional gaze of a smiling, life-sized, die-cut Barack Obama display, Webster and Barnett, both of Rockingham, talk about the energy of the Democratic party in between a steady stream of visitors to the Bellows Falls headquarters, one of three Democratic headquarters in Windham County.
The fact that the county can support three headquarters - one in Brattleboro and the other in Wilmington - can serve as another yardstick of the area's political activism.
In 2006, the party “had a hard time finding a headquarters in Brattleboro, and Monty suggested we open a headquarters here,” Webster says. “We got over 70 volunteers, and we found a lot of energy in this community. That's why we decided to do the same.”
“There's no question that Windham County is a Democratic county,” says Barnett, the chair of the Windham County Democrats and owner of the Rock and Hammer Jewelry store in Bellows Falls. “The question is, can we make that work for all the candidates?”
“People don't know what's happening,” Webster says. “They do know they're not better off with the Republicans in charge. Listen to the people on the street, how bad off they are.”
“Time and time again, you have to ask: why is a Democratic state electing a Republican governor?” Barnett said, echoing a constant theme of frustration. Many Democrats remain convinced that splitting the vote three ways among Douglas, Symington, and Pollina will result in another win for the Republican governor.
Barnett and Webster don't want to see that happen. “Douglas hasn't done anything,” Webster says. “He hasn't done anything good. He hasn't done anything bad.”
The Douglas legacy, the two volunteers say, point out a legacy of missed opportunities, like the purchase of a series of hydroelectric dams on the Deerfield River during the bankruptcy of USGen New England in 2005. The state dropped out of the bidding process, with TransCanada ultimately assuming ownership.
Most visitors to the storefront seek lawn signs and campaign materials for the Barack Obama presidential campaign, followed by interest in signage for the Symington campaign and interest in volunteering, Webster says.
“This headquarters is a place to get information out there, to get involved and to do something,” Webster says. “It's important in an area when demographics are leaning towards Democrats that you have a headquarters for them.”
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Many aspects of politicking in Vermont remain traditional - even more so than in many other parts of the country. With many national candidates finding seismic changes in the process of reaching voters via Internet video and social networking pages, Vermont lags behind because of a lack of high-speed Internet.
Consequently, the candidates, stopping just short of kissing babies, still must reach out face to face.
On a Friday night in September, the Anthony Pollina caravan - a car with the independent candidate for governor, and his entourage following in a distinctive yellow campaign van - has returned to Brattleboro. Pollina goes from bar to bar, pressing the flesh with prospective voters in bars after a long work week.
Two days later, his challenger, Vermont House Speaker Gaye Symington of Jericho, Vt., appears at what has been promoted as a pancake breakfast at the Brattleboro Democratic Campaign Headquarters. Despite the lack of pancakes - or maybe because of same - a steady handful of potential voters come to ask the speaker about her stances on issues ranging from Vermont Yankee relicensing to recourse for rental property health code violations.
Both candidates seek to unseat three-term incumbent Republican Jim Douglas.
At a campaign fundraiser at the West Brattleboro home of Peter and Gail Cooper this summer, Pollina arrived after a full day of campaigning, a 400-to-700-mile-per-week routine that requires crisscrossing the state, he said before making his stump speech to approximately 100 who came out to meet him.
Pollina calls Vermont “an easy place to campaign” because “it really is a community,” he says. “You see people you've known for years.”
But any candidate must face meeting people in tiny, far-flung towns, and Chittenden County, where one third of Vermont's entire population lives, “is not an easy population to reach,” Pollina observes. “It's urban, suburban, and rural - all at once.”
Pollina, a resident of the Washington County town of Middlesex who ran unsuccessfully as a Progressive for governor in 2000 and lieutenant governor in 2002 in similar three-way races, received 25 percent of the vote in his most recent contest in the race against Dubie and Democratic state Senator Peter Shumlin.
“If everyone who voted for me in 2002 votes for me again and brings a friend, then I've won,” Pollina says, denying his role as a potential spoiler by noting that, in 2004 and 2006, Democratic candidates were unable to defeat Douglas even without the complications of a three-way race.
Complicating the equation: the Vermont constitution mandates that an election where no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the total vote must be decided by the legislature. Douglas became governor after receiving 45 percent of the vote in the 2002 election; his opponent, then-Lieutentant Governor Doug Racine, received 42 percent. In the three-way race, independent candidate Con Hogan garnered 10 percent of the vote.
The three candidates have received mixed signals from polls and surveys, including a mid-September poll from a Burlington television station that predicts the decision will once again be thrown to the legislature.
“Everyone, from Republicans to progressive-leaning people, have found fault with this poll,” said Meg Brooks, Pollina's campaign manager.
“It's very interesting,” Brooks says. “Nobody has any idea how close the three of them are.”
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In recent years, Vermont has provided hospitable ground for candidates who don't follow their names with a “D” or an “R.”
“Our ballot access has been much more friendly in Vermont than in a lot of other states,” says Morgan Daybell, executive director of the Vermont Progressive Party. “And without party registration here, we have a history of people being independents, or at least independent of the two major parties.”
Even if victory is a long-shot, a third-party campaign "pushes the issues so elected officials can no longer be complacent," says Thomas J. Hermann, a Progressive candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. The veteran of the Iraq war moved to Barre from Florida only this year.
On a Saturday afternoon in late September, Hermann stood at the doorway of the River Garden in Brattleboro, eager to talk with passers-by about his campaign to hold his Democratic opponent, Peter Welch, accountable for his votes on legislation that funded the war.
Ben Mitchell, a member of the Liberty Union Party, proudly introduces himself as another such candidate.
Mitchell's party, a decidedly Vermont institution idealistically affiliated with the Socialist Party of the USA, is fielding a handful of other candidates, notably Peter Diamondstone, a party elder, who, like Symington and Pollina will vie for Douglas's seat. The Liberty Union party was founded in 1970 as “a party that would boldly address their issues, the war in Vietnam, the militarization of society, the problems of the poor and the destruction of the environment,” its Web site says.
At a time when major party candidates greet a growing financial crisis and potential government bailout of financial markets with grim caution, Mitchell speaks almost with glee about the “extreme opportunity” for a financial catastrophe to change the fabric of society.
“If I proposed a year ago to buy out Wall Street, you'd say, 'That's absurd',” Mitchell says.
“Both corporate parties [the Democrats and the Republicans] keep saying, 'The market is always the best solution',” Mitchell says, calling the profound instability of financial markets “the opportunity to show the fallacy of that belief system.”
Mitchell contends that the nation's drug policies, which put recreational drug users or addicts into “a revolving cycle of incarceration,” have cost society, and has vowed to use the office, if elected, to pardon those in jail for drug offenses “the first day the governor leaves the state for an afternoon.”
By day, Mitchell works as director of admissions at Landmark College in Putney. On nights and weekends, he puts on his campaign hat. With the mainstream media almost completely ignoring his candidacy, Mitchell posts on electronic communities like iBrattleboro and MySpace and speaks with excitement about visiting eighth-grade civics classes to speak to kids about political ideas.
A traditional campaign would leave Mitchell beholden to large donors, he says - yet he would have to raise $17,000 before qualifying for public campaign financing. Not surprisingly, he also has ideas about campaign finance reform and the role of money in politics. He wants it illegal.
But none of that will happen. “Look, I know I'm not going to win,” Mitchell says.
Like most third-party candidates, Mitchell threw himself into the race to expose the voting public to alternative ideas - to make citizens think and to expose people to political philosophies that exist beyond most voters' conception.
When Costello tried to set up a debate with Dubie, Mitchell says he offered to debate his Democratic opponent. To his delight, Costello accepted.
The three - as well as Progressive candidate Richard Kemp - will participate in a debate to be broadcast over Vermont Public Radio Wednesday, Oct. 29 at 7 p.m.
“Ordinarily, Liberty Union is excluded from debates because we're considered too radical,” Mitchell says. “People get afraid.”
* * *
“Vermont used to be Republican, and then a lot of people moved in from out of state,” Webster observes - but like everything else with Vermont politics, the designation is not quite so simple.
Windham County Republican Party Chair Michael Hebert describes a traditional Vermont conservative as “a traditional person, who kind of likes things the way they are,” one who favors “slow, evolutionary-type change, is frugal, and stands for small government.”
A number of political observers have pointed out that the Republican party has moved to the right nationally, leaving less extreme Vermont Republicans increasingly open to changing their party affiliation or considering voting across party lines.
“In my mind, a lot of people who identify as Republicans identify as 1902 Republicans,” said Morgan Daybell, executive director of the Vermont Progressive Party. “They really get that the Republican Party left them long ago, and they're a little more open to voting for Progressives.”
Webster believes the mainstream media has co-opted the definition of “liberal,” turning a more nuanced word into a loaded term of derision.
“Plenty of Vermont Republicans are liberal,” Webster says, savoring the irony. “They just don't know it.”
Even well into the campaign, it has been almost impossible to find even one McCain/Palin lawn sign in the Brattleboro area, another rough benchmark of the minority status of the Republican party in Windham County.
But Hebert, of Vernon, says there's a good, solid base of support for his Republicans. So does the state GOP organization, whose chair, Rob Roper, points to the ouster of Brattleboro Selectboard Chair Audrey Garfield as a conservative backlash to a decidedly progressive agenda.
Thirty-eight percent of Windham County voters cast a ballot for Douglas in 2006. President George W. Bush received 37.3 percent of the vote in 2004 in the county.
He describes Windham County citizens as “a very diverse group of people,” with a range of views reflected on the Brattleboro Union High School Board, where he serves as vice chairman.
The problem, says Hebert, himself a two-time candidate for state senate, comes with fielding new candidates who find themselves reluctant to subject themselves to a “not pleasant” political arena, one where candidates find themselves accused of negative campaigning when they express honest political differences.
Vermont has followed the national lead of increasingly nasty partisan political rhetoric, Hebert says sorrowfully. “A couple of decades ago, that wasn't so.”
Hebert describes former Democratic State Representative Tim O'Connor, a Brattleboro attorney who served in the legislature from 1969 to 1980, as “a fine speaker of the house” who didn't deserve to be “vilified” in recent years when he openly broke party lines and supported Douglas.
“I found that appalling,” he said.
Particularly distressing, says Hebert, a self-described “Catholic who was brought up with a set of values,” was the contention during the civil unions debate of 2000 that “if someone didn't agree with gay marriage, you were somehow a mean-spirited, intolerant homophobe.”
Hebert calls that the political environment unhospitable for candidates of any party. “If the roles were changed - if the legislature were predominantly Republican - we'd still see a problem getting candidates,” he says.
Taking the long view, Hebert says for Republicans to be successful once again in the state, “we must clearly define who and what we are as Vermont Republicans.”
“For far too long we have been defined by our opposition, with the support of most of the media outlets in the state,” he says. “We need to better utilize electronic media to get the voters engaged earlier in the process. Many folks today tend to only think about elections when the ads start popping up on television.”
Hebert, chairman of the state party platform committee, says a new platform for the electorate to consider “clearly reflects the views of Vermont Republicans, not just the die hard political junkies like myself.” He also says the party will look toward engaging young people in schools with guest speakers, Young Republican clubs, and other activities that will expose students to a broad variety of political ideas and ideologies.
“All this and more will take time,” Hebert says. “Change comes slowly. The Democrats did not gain control of the state overnight.”