This commentary is by Kevin Ellis of East Montpelier. He is a writer, podcaster and former lobbyist.
In 1985, a Jewish refugee from Switzerland named Madeleine Kunin became the first female governor of Vermont. Kunin had been a member of the legislature from Burlington and then lieutenant governor. Her election shifted the sands of Vermont politics forever. She brought women into government in historic numbers and focused new attention on the needs of children’s health care and the environment. Under her watch, the system changed.
That level of system change is about to happen again. A large swath of the Democratic majority in the state Senate has either died or retired, six in all. And they are all stalwarts from the old guard.
Those senators are soon to be replaced in November’s elections by a crop of younger, more progressive, more modern-thinking legislators.
Sens. Dick Mazza and Dick Sears are dead, and four senators of long standing are retiring.
Dick Mazza “is probably the most effective legislator in my lifetime in politics,’’ former Gov. Howard Dean told me last week. “A remarkable human being. If we had more people like that in politics we would be far better off.’’
When you travel around Vermont, you are driving on roads paved and graded with money controlled by Mazza. When you walk into schools, courthouses or see infrastructure like a sewer treatment plant, it is likely that Mazza had a hand in paying for it with taxpayer dollars.
If you are gay and want to get married, Sen. Sears played a major role in getting Vermont’s same-sex marriage law passed in 2009, not to mention a slew of criminal justice reforms. Sears designed the legalization of cannabis legislation too.
Add to these deaths the retirements of four senators — Jane Kitchel, Dick McCormack, Brian Campion and Robert Starr — and you have a Vermont Senate that is changing dramatically.
In addition, the decision by former Gov. Vermont Howard Dean NOT to run for governor recognizes in part that a new generation of politicians is waiting in the wings to run this state. Many of them are already serving.
Lastly — the Democratic Party in Vermont has decided to send a very young group of delegates to its national convention in Chicago. The list of delegates includes a host of next-generation political activists who are running campaigns and getting people elected at every level. The party chose not to send former Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger to the Chicago convention. Instead, Weinberger’s top political advisor Samantha Sheehan is going.
Look no further than Rep. Katherine Sims of Greensboro to understand how Vermont’s political landscape is changing. Sims is running to replace Bobby Starr in the Northeast Kingdom. She is a vastly different candidate. She is more progressive, more modern in her views and, of course, a woman. Most of all, Sims is younger, next-generation.
Sims leads a wave of new legislators who are changing the Vermont political system in dramatic ways.
Senators like Mazza, Sears and Starr focused on paving roads and running government. They were institutional senators who believed in a system that worked — it just had to be tweaked to work better.
These new legislators see fundamental flaws in the system — that it was designed by older men for the benefit of older men — and believe it needs to be changed. Child care, policing and criminal justice, taxes on the wealthy, school funding.
Sims and some of her colleagues remaking the Vermont legislature are graduates of Emerge Vermont, the non-profit group that recruits and trains Democratic women to run for office here.
And guess who founded Emerge Vermont — the aforementioned Madeleine Kunin.
Kunin may have changed Vermont with her election as governor back in 1985. But her founding of Emerge Vermont has arguably had a bigger impact.
Not only does Emerge Vermont recruit and train Democratic women candidates. It has a “cabinet’’ of graduates and advisors who make up a kind of a new political power elite. In the Kunin-Snelling-Dean era, governors leaned on Burlington power brokers in law and finance. No longer.
This younger generation that has seized power in the Vermont legislature is slated to do battle with the very last representative of the Kunin-Snelling-Dean era — current Governor Phil Scott. The governor learned the legislative ropes under Dick Mazza and Dick Sears. He sat on Mazza’s two legislative committees and made sure to listen very closely.
Scott is running for re-election on a platform of keeping Vermont affordable while this next generation says we can’t afford to allow the wealthy to walk away with so much money that we can’t pay for our schools.
Scott has the easier argument and will likely win an easy fourth term. But legislators have a way of sticking around while governors come and go.
A new generation of Democrats and progressives have taken over the Vermont Statehouse. Get ready for the very foundations of our government and politics to be questioned and then changed to fit an emerging culture that is vastly different from what came before it.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Kevin Ellis: Get ready for the foundations of our government and politics to be questioned and then changed.