For years, the Vermont GOP has been trying to win the Orange County seat held by Sen. Mark MacDonald.
But MacDonald, a Williamstown farmer and former social studies teacher who spent 11 years in the House and 23 in the Senate, has bested a succession of Republican challengers. In the past decade, MacDonald has not won less than 52% of the vote in a general election contest — that is, not until Tuesday.
This year, Republican Larry Hart, a building supply salesman and former Topsham selectboard member, finally succeeded in dislodging MacDonald — a decisive victory that came as voters, frustrated over taxes and the state’s high cost of living, flipped legislative seats across Vermont for the GOP.
In an interview Wednesday, Hart attributed his victory to “empathy” for Orange County residents: “Being compassionate to the voters, and asking them ‘What are their biggest concerns?’ and listening to them,” he said.
On Tuesday, backed by endorsements by Gov. Phil Scott and thousands in campaign donations from a handful of wealthy families, Republicans flipped six seats in the Senate, including Orange County’s. The district is composed of 13 towns, including Randolph, Williamstown and Bradford.
Hart said he’d heard many concerns from residents, particularly those on fixed incomes, about scraping by: “Can they afford to pay for their fuel oil, electricity, food or medicine, or do they have to make a choice which one of those they can pay for?”
According to unofficial figures from the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office, Hart won 54% of the vote to MacDonald’s 41%. Another 3.5% of voters had left the choice blank.
“Oh, I’m depressed,” MacDonald said in an interview Wednesday morning. But having watched unfavorable results trickle in from the polls Tuesday night, he said, his loss did not come as a surprise.
MacDonald expressed frustration that, in his perspective, Republicans had managed to pin the blame on Democrats for high costs and taxes even though Gov. Scott had not offered solutions to the problems facing the state.
“It takes two sides to get together, and the two sides failed to get together, and then it worked to the advantage of one side and not the other,” he said.
Will MacDonald run again in two years? “Only in my wildest fantasies,” he said, pointing out that he will turn 82 in December.
For Orange County, the vote signifies the end of an era. MacDonald is the second-oldest sitting senator, according to John Bloomer, the secretary of the Senate. He is one day younger than retiring Sen. Bobby Starr, D-Orleans.
MacDonald was first appointed to the House in 1983 to fill the seat vacated by his late mother, Barbara MacDonald. He served there until 1995.
In 1996, MacDonald was elected to the Senate, where he served until being unseated in 2000 — one of a slew of Democratic losses after the Legislature took a historic vote to legalize civil unions. MacDonald had supported the measure, saying that he would not have been able to explain a “no” vote to his students.
MacDonald won back the seat two years later and has held onto it until now, despite repeated efforts from the Vermont GOP to topple him.
“This is a seat that we’ve been focused on for a while,” Paul Dame, the chair of the Vermont Republican Party, said last month.
Hart said Thursday that his victory after years of Republican attempts was due in part to his low-key persona.
“I’m a moderate, not ultra-conservative, and I wasn’t (an) in-your-face type of politician,” Hart said Thursday. Some past Republican challengers were, he said, “and I think that pushed too many people away.”
Hart did not name any names. But in 2022, MacDonald handily repelled a challenge from John Klar, a farmer and firebrand writer who has been vocal about hot-button issues like race and gender.
MacDonald’s longevity in the relatively conservative district is also thanks to the fact that “he’s a heck of a campaigner,” said Don Hooper, a longtime Orange County resident and a former secretary of state and state representative. “Nobody’s knocked on more doors in Vermont than Mark McDonald.”
In his tenure in the Statehouse, MacDonald served for many years as the vice chair of the Senate Committee on Finance and on the Natural Resources and Energy Committee. According to Hooper, he developed a reputation as a dependable policy wonk who was capable of distilling complex issues into digestible pieces.
“Mark was the guy that we entrusted to report the hardest bills (to the floor),” Hooper said: controversial legislation on recycling, underground fuel tanks and the legislation that would become Act 60, a landmark law that equalized school funding across the state, allowing high-income and low-income areas to spend similar amounts on education.
Asked for his proudest accomplishment in the Statehouse, MacDonald pointed to that legislation, which has provided the framework for Vermont’s school funding for nearly 30 years.
“By any measure, it’s been a remarkable success,” MacDonald said, although “it’s ready for some work, that’s for sure.”
Tim Ashe, the former Senate president pro tempore, who chaired the Senate finance committee for four years while MacDonald was vice chair, praised MacDonald’s grasp of complex issues, his principles and his talent as a sharp-penned cartoonist.
“Mark has been an unapologetic supporter and champion of issues like environmental protection, clean energy, preserving rural public education (and) many other issues,” he said. “Orange County disproportionately benefits from these things.”
Ashe said he has not met Hart, the senator-elect, “but he does have massive shoes to fill.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: GOP finally unseats Sen. Mark MacDonald, 34-year veteran of the Statehouse.