Stewart Ledbetter has been trained to keep his opinions to himself. It’s part of what made him one of the most recognizable broadcast journalists in the state.
As an NBC5 news anchor, Ledbetter reported on the ins and outs of Vermont, and he also moderated Vermont Public’s weekly political roundtable, “Vermont This Week.” He retired in February after 40 years in the state’s press corps.
But over the past three months, he’s had to cast aside much of the objectivity he subscribed to during his career as he pursues a new job — one for which having an opinion is very much part of the gig.
In May, just months after his retirement, Ledbetter announced a run for one of three seats in the Vermont Senate’s Chittenden Central district, one of the most progressive districts in the state. He’s challenging three incumbents who are running together as a slate in the Democratic primary: Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, a Democrat/Progressive; Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky, a Progressive/Democrat; and Sen. Martine Gulick, a Democrat.
The race has quickly turned into one of the most closely watched primaries of this election season. With the four candidates running on similar platforms, the outcome could come down to name recognition — but in this case, unusually, the political newcomer might have the upper hand.
“That’s something that Mr. Ledbetter is using — he’s invoking it a lot and bringing it up,” Gulick said. “In one utterance he will say that he’s a fresh face and that he’s been around the Legislature for 40 years. Those two things are in a little bit of conflict for me.”
For his part, Ledbetter said he wasn’t sure how much his name recognition would help his prospects. “You earn a reputation day by day over a long period of time. I don’t know whether that is an advantage,” he said. “I guess we’ll see.”
Consensus or concession?
The incumbents, in making their cases for reelection, have each emphasized the need for their particular brand of experience.
Pointing to the high rate of turnover in the Senate, Baruth has underscored the institutional knowledge he brings to the role. The chamber will have lost 16 of its 30 members over two election cycles come January, and more than half of the Senate will have less than two years of experience.
“That is unprecedented,” said Baruth, who was first elected in 2010 and is now one of the most senior members of the chamber. For the past two years, he’s led the chamber as the Senate president pro tempore. “I was elected in part two years ago to help manage that change,” he said. “And I very much hope that the voters will send back one of the few truly experienced people left in the Senate.”
Vyhovsky, who was elected to the Senate in 2022 and previously served one term in the House, has made the case that she brings a crucial perspective as one of very few renters in the Statehouse. Voices like hers, she said, are “critically important in the policy-making process.”
In her pitch to voters, Gulick, who was also elected to the Senate in 2022, has pointed to her long commitment to public service — she was a teacher and a Burlington school board member before becoming a state senator. “I’m prepared to do the work,” she said. “Because I don’t have any designs on any other higher office — I just want to be a senator, and I just want to represent my constituents — I can make hard decisions, and I can go against the grain. This is all I want to do.”
Ledbetter, meanwhile, has sought to present himself as a consensus-builder — someone who can bridge the divide between lawmakers in the Democratic supermajority and the state’s Republican governor, Phil Scott.
This year’s legislative session was marked by a “degree of dysfunction or disconnect” that he had never seen in his years covering Vermont, he said during a forum hosted by Vermont Conservation Voters. Tensions mounted as lawmakers and the governor debated how to address flooding concerns, dramatic property tax increases, housing and other weighty issues.
“Maybe I’m being naive, but I will try my damndest to reach some consensus in Montpelier and help reduce the level of tension and see if we can’t forge at least some greater compromise,” he said during the July 9 candidate forum.
Gulick, generally considered the most vulnerable of the three incumbents, having won her seat by four votes after a recount during the 2022 Democratic primary, questioned the practicality of such a pledge.
“What does, quote unquote, working with the governor look like?” she said in an interview. “If you have a governor who vetoes some pretty important legislation, what does working with him look like? Does it mean that you have to make compromises on Democratic priorities? Does it mean that you have to compromise your values?”
The crime question
In many areas there is little daylight between the candidates’ policy stances. They all agree, for instance, that climate change is here and directly affecting Vermont; protecting reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights is paramount; the state’s judicial system is struggling and its prison system faces deep racial disparities; and the state desperately needs new housing.
“I couldn’t tell you any ground that Ledbetter is staking out, which is an interesting way to challenge incumbents, I think,” observed Chris Pearson, a former Progressive/Democratic senator from Burlington.
One issue on which Ledbetter has gone on the offensive, however, is public safety in downtown Burlington. Serial retail theft, he said, is a major threat to the economic health of the city and region. He pointed to recent legislation that created new felony charges for repeat retail theft. Both Gulick and Baruth voted in favor of it, while Vyhovsky opposed it.
“I don’t get it. She downplays the seriousness of the problem, suggests that the data is invented, and that we need to be more compassionate towards those who steal,” Ledbetter said in an interview. “I have a different view. Downtown is too important. We can’t gamble with Vyhovsky’s experiment.”
Vyhovsky in an interview said that while there are certainly problems in Burlington that need to be addressed, she thinks “it’s important to recognize that Burlington is still one of the safest cities in the country.”
She voted against the retail theft bill, she said, “because creating more felons isn’t going to solve any problem.”
“I would agree that we do need to do something about Burlington,” she said. “I would, however, say that what drives me is making sure that I’m following the data to do something that’s going to work, not something that’s actually just going to do more harm to our communities.”
She pointed to legislation she supported to create an Overdose Prevention Center in Burlington, and legislation to increase staffing to the judiciary so courts can clear backlogs.
‘I didn’t solicit this’
Ledbetter has significantly outraised the three incumbents, hauling in nearly $50,000 from donors representing a surprising array of the state’s political spectrum, according to the most recent campaign finance reports filed with the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office.
He has garnered financial support from former Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin, Burlington-area landlords and developers such as Eric Farrell and Jeffrey Davis, and some conservative political types such as former Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Lisman, and Richard Tarrant, a former U.S. Senate candidate.
Senate President Pro Tempore Sen. Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, addresses the Senate at the Statehouse on April 30, 2024. File photo by Natalie Williams/VTDigger
Gulick had raised $13,000 as of the July 1 filing deadline; Vyhovsky raised just under $3,500; and Baruth has not reported raising any money. The next filing deadline is Aug. 1.
While Ledbetter’s campaign coffers may suggest an advantage, the source of some of those funds has also been fodder for criticism.
Asked by an audience member of the July 9 forum about whether he could be “trusted as a Democrat while accepting donations from Republicans, landlords and the ultra-wealthy,” Ledbetter said that while he was proud of the support he’s received, his contributors would be disappointed if “they think I’m going to vote the Republican line.”
“I didn’t solicit this. It was as big a surprise to me as it was to anybody else,” he said. “Over the course of my career, I was trusted as a journalist, and I think people think they know you and are willing to take a chance on a first-time candidate that they feel that they know. I hope that’s the case. I don’t know why some of these folks gave me money, but I’m going to use it to communicate with Democratic primary voters in the weeks leading up to this primary.”
That response hasn’t satisfied all of his opponents.
“Of course where our money comes from matters,” Vyhovsky said. “It gives me significant pause and I have, for a long time, advocated strongly for campaign finance reform, because I think where we get our money from matters.”
Gulick said she was disappointed in Ledbetter’s attitude toward the financial support and said she finds it to be “politically oblique and maybe naive.”
Baruth, however, said he doesn’t see Ledbetter’s contributions as “cause for alarm or doubts about his character as a person.”
“Stewart is a very well-known person in Vermont. I think it was always a foregone conclusion that he would raise significant funds,” he said in an interview. “I know some people are scrutinizing the source of those funds. I don’t see a lot of profit in that myself.”
‘Popularity contest’?
Ledbetter is hardly the first former journalist to run for office. Jack Barry, a distinguished broadcast journalist who also hosted “Vermont This Week,” was subsequently elected to the state Senate in 1994.
In 2014, Paul Lefebvre, a columnist and Statehouse reporter for the Barton Chronicle, ran and won as a Republican for a House seat in the Northeast Kingdom.
More recently, Chea Waters Evans, a former reporter with the Charlotte News and The Citizen, unseated former Rep. Michael Yantachka for Charlotte’s seat in the Vermont House after campaigning against his voting record on Proposal 5, which enshrined the right to personal reproductive liberty in the state’s constitution.
Stewart Ledbetter is honored by the House of Representatives on February 6, 2024, following the announcement of his retirement from broadcast journalism. File photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
Whether Ledbetter’s career in journalism will work in his favor remains to be seen.
“That’s something I hear from people a lot, is that they trust him, because they trusted him as a journalist, and so they trust him in the political sphere as well,” said Kurt Wright, a former Republican city councilor and state representative from Burlington who went the opposite direction by becoming a talk radio host at the end of his political career. “That does work to his benefit.”
But others have noted the difficulty in unseating incumbents — particularly without emphasizing major policy differences.
Like a lot of people in journalism, “I never had a sense of his own personal politics,” Pearson said. “Now he’s running for office and I still don’t. If you’re challenging incumbents, there’s a burden to make an argument about the need for a change.”
“But of course,” he added, “a popularity contest is a big part of what happens.”
Primary elections typically draw out voters more attuned to the political process. That may not translate well for a centrist Democratic running in “one of the most progressive state Senate districts in Vermont, if not the country,” said Josh Wronski, the director of the Vermont Progressive Party.
Voters also may not know or care about Ledbetter’s background. “I think oftentimes, in both politics and media, we tend to put too much clout on people who are in prominent roles,” Wronski said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Can a veteran journalist unseat one of three senators he used to report on?.