Though Vermont’s congressional delegation didn’t face much in the way of a challenge on Election Day, their role in Congress will look different with Republicans taking control of the White House and the Senate.
U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt, and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, easily bested their opponents on Tuesday. But along with U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt, who wasn’t up for reelection, they will return to a substantially altered political landscape.
While Balint and Welch struck a reflective if defiant tone in interviews, Sanders seized the moment to blast the Democratic Party’s presidential showing and what he called a “disastrous campaign.”
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he said in a statement. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
Along with the presidency, Republicans flipped the balance of power in the Senate. With it, Sanders will lose his powerful chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, a position he has used to chip away at his long-held goal of reforming the country’s health care system. Welch, too, will find himself in the minority. The House, currently controlled by the GOP, was too close to call as of Wednesday afternoon.
In interviews Wednesday, Balint and Welch took stock of the Democratic Party’s major national losses and argued they could find success for Vermonters by working across the aisle with GOP colleagues. Sanders’ office did not make the senator available for an interview Wednesday.
Balint said she was still unpacking a range of emotions following a sleepless night, from gratitude for her reelection to “sadness, shock, disappointment, anger.”
Democrats, and Americans more generally, need to figure out how to “build a strong coalition of working people that is across race, that is across gender and geography,” Balint said, following what she described as “the most racist, sexist, most divisive presidential campaign that someone has ever run in in modern history.”
She warned that a second Donald Trump presidency may lack “guardrails” due to the Supreme Court’s immunity decision in the former president’s favor, and said Trump could be “incredibly vindictive” toward his political adversaries in a second term.
But Balint also suggested she could find success in Congress by partnering with colleagues who share Vermont’s rural interests, congressional members that in private “cannot stand” Trump.
“These are the people we’re going to be appealing to to be writing legislation that is truly reflective of all of rural America, not just, you know, quote-unquote ‘red rural America,’ but states like Vermont,” Balint said, adding that she would continue working to address the “crisis of affordability for working people nationally.”
Welch, for his part, said he had two primary takeaways from Election Day: the need to push back against Trump’s violent rhetoric and “assault on institutions and the rule of law,” and the resonance of the president-elect’s message on matters of economic inequality.
“I think Trump has the capacity to connect with the economic anxieties that Americans have, and it really reflects how much income inequality has been institutionalized in the past 40 years,” Welch said, “even though the Trump approaches to dealing with that — tax cuts for billionaires — won’t help.”
While being in the minority caucus means Senate Democrats won’t set the legislative agenda, Welch said he could nonetheless use his position to support the “constitutional rights” of Vermonters.
“Before this election, I sent texts to all my Republican colleagues, or almost all of them, just saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got an independent responsibility to try to do all we can to help the people we represent. Whatever the outcome of this election is, I’m looking forward to working together,’” he said. “I received a lot of very positive responses. We’ll see. But the point is, the fact that we’re in the minority in no way diminishes my energy and commitment to do every single thing I can to help Vermont.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont’s federal delegation reflects on a new reality in Washington.