Billi Gosh, a longtime Democratic National Committee member who lives in Brookfield, traveled to New Hampshire this month to knock on doors for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. But with two weeks remaining before Vermont’s March 1 primary, Gosh doesn’t expect to do the same in her own state.
“I can’t get people to put up lawn signs,” Gosh said with an air of resignation.
Sarah Buxton, a Democratic state representative from Tunbridge, has a Clinton bumper sticker, but she hasn’t yet put it on her car.
“I debate every day if I should come out of the closet,” Buxton said.
It’s not easy to be a Clinton supporter in Vermont. Scan the roadsides and your Facebook feed, and listen to the chatter on the streets. There’s no escaping that this is the home state of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Clinton’s surprisingly successful rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Vermont voters have been electing Sanders for 35 years as Burlington mayor, U.S. congressman and, for nearly a decade, U.S. senator. Now that he’s in a competitive race for the presidency, Bernie-mania is saturating the state. As the Town Meeting Day primary nears, is there any reason for Clinton to care at all about Vermont voters?
“It’s a safe prediction to say Sanders is going to win,” said former Vermont governor Madeleine Kunin, an ardent Clinton supporter who served as ambassador to Switzerland and deputy secretary of education in the administration of her husband, president Bill Clinton.
But the former secretary of state and her supporters aren’t ceding Vermont to Sanders either, according to Kunin.
“There still can be Hillary delegates,” she said.
Both Clinton and Sanders will be looking for every delegate they can in collecting the magic number — 2,382 — required to win the nomination. Vermont doesn’t have many to offer, but Clinton will be looking for a share — and for a chance to show that Sanders doesn’t have his own state locked up entirely.
The game of presidential primary delegate selection is complicated, intricate and conspiracy-theory-inducing, even to those who immerse themselves in it every four years. Vermont is expected to have 26 delegates total, though the number technically remains in flux until July, pending approval by the Democratic National Committee, according to Vermont Democratic Party executive director Conor Casey.
Eleven of those are “district delegates,” who are up for grabs on March 1. The Sanders-Clinton proportion is determined by the election results on that day, and the individuals selected to represent Vermont at the convention have to vote accordingly. For Clinton to accrue any district delegates, she’ll need to win at least 15 percent of the Vermont vote on March 1.
Those 11 district delegates choose five more: two from among local and state officials; three “at-large.”
Another 10 are superdelegates, who tend to be high-level Vermont Democratic leaders — including, for the first time, Sanders himself, according to Casey. Unlike district delegates, superdelegates can vote for whomever they choose.
Clinton has the backing of four of the 10 superdelegates: U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Gov. Peter Shumlin, former governor Howard Dean and Gosh. Sanders can count on votes from himself and Democratic National Committee member Rich Cassidy. Four others have not publicly declared their preference: U.S. Congressman Peter Welch, Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos, Rep. Tim Jerman (D-Essex Junction) and Dottie Deans. Deans is chair of the Vermont Democratic Party; Jerman is the vice chair.
New Hampshire’s primary results last week highlighted just how important superdelegates are to the process. Sanders won there by 22 percentage points and took 15 district delegates to Clinton’s nine. But figuring in Clinton’s superdelegate support, the two candidates came out of the Granite State with 15 delegates apiece.
After last week’s primary, Politico reported that Clinton planned to campaign even in states sympathetic to Sanders — including Vermont — to pick up whatever delegates she can.
“We are going on offense in the states that the Sanders campaign thinks will make for the friendliest terrain for them,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, a Vermont native, told Politico.
Signs of that are only just beginning to materialize in Vermont. Clinton campaign spokeswoman Julie McClain, fresh off working the New Hampshire primary, started to shift her attention Friday to Vermont. Clinton’s New Hampshire organizing director, Meagan Gardner, will head up the Vermont operation, according to McClain.
“We intend to compete everywhere,” McClain said. “It will be an uphill battle, but we’re committed to there being an organization in Vermont.”
Politico reported Friday that Clinton would be airing television ads in the Vermont market leading up to March 1, but McClain said she could not confirm that.
What the Clinton ground game in Vermont will look like is still unclear. Gosh said that when she campaigned for Clinton in New Hampshire, she knocked on doors armed with information about each voter’s political leanings. That kind of organization has yet to materialize in Vermont, she said.
McClain said Clinton supporters in the state can expect “without a doubt” to start hearing about campaign activities soon.
Kunin said last week that with Nevada and South Carolina votes looming, it’s too early to see signs of Clinton’s efforts in Vermont.
“I strongly believe we should be making an effort,” she said. “The campaign’s going to fight for every delegate.” Kunin went to bat for Clinton this month with an opinion piece in the Boston Globe titled, “When Bernie Sanders Ran Against Me in Vermont,” and in a CNN interview, in which she declared, “Being a Democrat is not new for Hillary.”
Vermont has a history of backing its own — and of bucking Hillary Clinton.
In 2004, Vermont Democrats chose then-presidential candidate Dean, 58 to 34 percent, over then-Massachusetts senator John Kerry, who would go on to win the nomination. Dean picked up nine district delegates in Vermont, compared to six for Kerry. It was the only state Dean won. He had already dropped out of the race.
In 2008, Barack Obama, the eventual winner, won 59.4 percent of the vote over Clinton’s 38.7. He won nine delegates; she took six.
Clinton would hardly be the first presidential candidate to make it to Election Day without visiting Vermont. The Green Mountain State is usually considered too small to warrant a candidate visit, particularly with 10 other states voting that day.
It’s not certain that Sanders will make it home for the Vermont primary, either. Asked if the candidate plans to vote in-person in Burlington, Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs said, “We don’t have a schedule nailed down yet.” He also would not say whether the campaign planned a vigorous get-out-the-vote effort in Vermont.
Eight years ago, when Clinton and Obama were competing for the nomination, both campaigns had a presence in Vermont, according to Gosh. She’s seen no parallel organization for Clinton this year, which she attributes to Sanders’ home-state advantage.
Clinton supporters in Vermont know they are swimming against the tide in a sea of Sanders supporters, but most admit to being taken aback by how well Sanders has done — and how harsh the tone has been against Clinton, especially on social media.
“There are few opportunities to engage in a substantive conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of the two candidates that’s not filled with emotion,” Buxton said. “I feel viscerally sad about it.”
Buxton said she is as reluctant to put a Clinton lawn sign in her yard as she is a bumper sticker on her car.
“I fear backlash from my progressive friends and constituents,” she said. “He is beloved by people in my communities. It’s Republicans. It’s veterans. It’s libertarians.”
Valerie Carzello, who volunteered last year to collect signatures to get the former secretary of state on the Vermont ballot, said she was greeted favorably on Church Street, where Sanders has Senate and campaign offices.
“Even Republicans were polite,” the South Burlington resident said.
But as the race heats up, Carzello finds herself defending Clinton against what she considers unfair criticisms.
When a friend questioned her about Clinton’s ties to Wall Street, a point Sanders has been hammering, Carzello went to YouTube to find a video of Clinton delivering a speech to Goldman Sachs. She said she didn’t find Clinton pandering to Wall Street.
“The tone of her speech wasn’t something that I’d say, ‘Oh, my god, you’re abhorrent,'” Carzello said. “If they hired me, I’d give a speech.”
Buxton, a lawyer who worked on Dean’s 2004 campaign, said people accuse her of supporting Clinton only in hopes that she’ll get a job out of it.
“I will get absolutely nothing out of Hillary Clinton being president, except to tell my nieces that a woman can be president now,” she said.
To her Republican grandfather, “I said, ‘She’s the most highly credentialed candidate we’ve had to choose from since Dwight D. Eisenhower,'” she recounted.
Rep. Johannah Donovan (D-Burlington), a Clinton supporter who is a generation older than Buxton, made a similar analogy.
“She’s probably the most capable and smartest person running for president since Thomas Jefferson,” said Donovan, who admitted that her own granddaughter had traveled to New Hampshire to campaign for Sanders.
Gosh, too, finds herself buffeted by Sanders’ supporters around her, despite her longtime allegiance to Clinton. She was a superdelegate in 2008 who backed Clinton into the second day of the national convention, until the candidate released her delegates to support Obama.
This year, she said friends have tried to turn her into a Sanders supporter, but she is holding strong. “I’m with Hillary all the way,” she said, citing Clinton’s experience as first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state.
“She certainly knows foreign policy,” Gosh said. “Bernie does not, to that depth.”
Still, Gosh conceded she’s surprised by the strength of Sanders’ run so far. In New Hampshire, she said, “I expected we would lose. I had hoped she would lose by single digits.”
Gosh was even more surprised by how many young women are supporting Sanders. When, days before the New Hampshire primary, feminist Gloria Steinem said it was in order to appeal to men, that was “unfortunate,” Gosh said of the controversial statement.
“Something has to change,” she said. “There has to be more sensitivity to the way young women think and feel. We can’t do it in a demeaning way.”
But Gosh said she thinks the tide will turn in Clinton’s favor after Super Tuesday, when primary contests will be decided not just in Vermont, but in the southern states of Alabama and Arkansas and populous states such as Massachusetts and Texas. As the November general election nears, Gosh predicted, Clinton yard signs will start popping up on Vermont lawns.
In the meantime, she said, she’ll be having “low-key” conversations with a list of Clinton supporters she knows in Vermont, encouraging them to contribute to the campaign and making sure they vote.
This article appears in Feb 17-23, 2016.
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I think this article points to a lot of the reason there is such political gridlock and why a lot of us are disgusted with politicians. It used to be disagreements were expected from the different parties and viewpoints but in the end everyone would get together and voice their disagreements and a compromise would be reached. Ted Kennedy was a liberal democrat but he was willing to meet a president or members of the GOP and attempt to reach a middle ground. Now it is the “I want it my way and the only compromise is the other side has to agree to my view and I will not change” which I find very childish. So some people prefer Hillary over Bernie. That is the point of primaries etc. I am for term limits and getting new ideas in politics
“It’s not easy to be a Clinton supporter in Vermont. Scan the roadsides and your Facebook feed, and listen to the chatter on the streets. There’s no escaping that this is the home state of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Clinton’s surprisingly successful rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.”
The above is 100% accurate. So why do our resident clowns — St. Patrick, Scummy, Hey Ho Deano, Ku-mon… et al decidedly support HRC??? Boy, this crew sure represents the interests of us citizens, huh?
Where’s the outrage? Poor Bernie just gets no respect when a pathological liar and her cheating husband are to live in the WH, according to our SENIOR senator and current/former govs. What the hell…
Dwight D. Eisenhower was “highly-credentialed”? He was probably the worst President we’ve ever had besides George W. Bush.
Wow! I guess for MarkW there is only one correct way to think and it is his. There is only one acceptable presidential candidate and it is his. Anything other than his way is simply unacceptable. It is absolutely outrageous that anyone could possibly even THINK about supporting anyone other than his preferred candidate. How dare anyone! So therefore it’s acceptable to call the infidels names! You “clowns”! Hey, why don’t we just round up the people who support Hillary and shoot them?! Not only that, none of our elected officials have a right to their own opinion or a right to exercise their own judgment. They must simply reflect the will of the mob and support Bernie.
Hey, why even have a primary? Let’s just declare our preferred candidate the nominee and get on with it. No right-thinking person could possibly disagree.
The concept of superdelegates is silly. All it really does is keep the power in the hands of the power.
If you listen to MarkW Bernie walks on water. Perhaps some people who have had dealings with him have other opinions, that he is close minded, and uses the press to further him and his agendas despite the facts. There are always 2 sides at least
I am a life long independent and BTW, will NOT vote for HRC or Bernie. Personal opinions are like a-holes, everybody has one. But when this stupid Super Delagate stuff is on the line, is it personal preference or will of the peeps?
What a nice commentary knowyourassumptions, I take it from you as a high compliment. That tin of whoop ass you opened makes it seem like somebody had a bad day. Here’s an idea: comment on the news story and not how I apparently rubbed you the wrong way.
Peace out.
“That tin of whoop ass you opened makes it seem like somebody had a bad day.”
Funny. What you’re describing is your original post on this thread. “Resident clowns.” “Patholigical liar.” “Cheating husband.” Words you used because you don’t like other people’s political preferences. You could use a little more self-awareness and a little less name-calling.
The Democratic State Committee is made up of local party folks from the grassroots of Vermont. They elect a State Committee MAN and WOMAN, one could argue maybe, to represent the interests or intentions of the State Committee to the DNC. One would THINK the committee person would at least consider the inclination of the state they represent when making a decision on who they would support and cast a delegate vote for–super delegates also, but they are not directly associated with the state party.
With Bernie currently favored by something like 75% of his fellow citizens, apparently that consideration is being replaced by personal preference in the case of some elected persons.
Super Delegate system should be abolished in a party that supposedly cherishes the roots of Vermont!
It is strange to me that anyone who worked for Howard Dean in 2004 like Sarah Buxton could now support Clinton. Dean was courageously against the even-then obviously wrong and concocted Iraq War (before the WMD lies became widely known). Hillary, of course, voted FOR Iraq War, embracing Bush-Cheney’s ridiculous notion of “preemptive” war against a country that had never attacked the United States (even assuming they did have WMD). Bernie is far from perfect but between the two, certainly the lesser of evils.
This is the same Sarah Buxton who sponsored the unfunded universal preschool law that has had the perverse result of raising child care tuition rates across the state and limiting child care options. To my knowledge, Sarah Buxton does not even have any children (and thus is completely exempt from the real world impact of her law, other than its negative impact on the Vermont budget). It is based on a one-time federal grant that expires shortly and will then require the Vermont legislature to raise taxes yet again (in this already insane property tax environment). As a long-time independent who usually voted Democrat, it is exactly because of irresponsible decisions like this that I can no longer vote Democrat at local level in VT.
If the superdelegates play to the corporate structure that has become the democratic party, Sanders could win as high as 55% of the popular vote across the country and 2/3 of the states and still lose to Clinton if they vote for her at a rate of 35 to 1 which is the present status.
It is precisely HRC’s foreign policy “experience” which should convince Vermonters and others to end their support for her candidacy. HRC is a strong supporter of the military industrial complex, and they are strong supporters of her: https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/ind… By her own admission, while SOS she sought advice from, and is a great admirer of, war criminal, Henry Kissinger. Her gleeful response to the brutal torture and murder of the Libyan head of state by US and NATO backed “rebels” and the chaos and genocide wrought there is unconscionable. HRC’s own emails have confirmed that the real reason that Libya was bombed, radicals were armed, and their leader murdered was that Libya was preparing to launch a gold-back currency to rival the dollar in Africa: https://news.vice.com/article/libyan-oil-g… Establishment Democrates are showing their real motivations by supporting HRC, they want to protect their personal wealth. The only group that supported HRC in NH was people earning over $200,000/yr. It’s no wonder they want to hide their support here in Vermont.
Superdelegates are part of the problem in our democracy. The winner should win by votes, not superpowers.
All I can say is that I and every person voting for Bernie will well remember who of those delegates vote for $Hillary.
In regard to know yourassumptions, I hear you and I hear you say Bernie is not perfect but when you compare him to the deep corruption and greed and total apparent lack of caring for your fellow countryman Bernie rises so far to the top. I am 67 years old and have been waiting for a grumpy old man like him for years( I would have taken a woman also but there are none running that fit). I myself notice my passion in this election and know that it is because this election is sooo important to me and others have shared that as well. You are so free to choose whomever you feel represents you just know that there is so much passion connected to this that someone like me can appear to be as you described. In the end I hope the grumpy man wins and good luck to you and yours
Madeleine Kunin and the Democratic party establishment: she’s just licking the hand that’s fed her for years.
Good post Leonard. I think my earlier posts were not well written or not understood. I’m not voting for Bernie or HRC. Point is, the DNC calls the shots and right now I bet they’re in a mad scramble.
It’s the principle. Bernie could overwhelmingly win the popular vote, but Superdelegates could vote for HRC. Just look at how the DNC manipulated New Hampshire. We’ll know come the Dem convention. Then again, HRC could be out by then…
Don’t know what I did to badger knowyourassumptions, but this is what I was trying to say.
This is an election for the ages.
Bernie has never been a member of the Democratic Party. Over his entire political career, 35 years or so, he has only had nasty things to say about the Democratic Party. But now, when it’s convenient for him to use the Democratic Party for his presidential ambitions, he and his supporters are all upset about the Party’s delegate rules, all of which were in place and known before he decided to run under the Party’s banner. Dude crashes a party, then complains about the music and who else is there. Could have run as an independent, as he always has before this year. Would have been a lot more honest. But no.
I don’t recall hearing Bernie complain at all. Only his supporters are and as a voter, you should be questioning the superdelegate process as well. It diminishes the value of your vote. As far as Bernie running as a democrat, I guess he could run as an independent. I think then we would see Bernie beat Hillary by a popular vote but I’m guessing he doesn’t want to divide the party. Bernie saying he is a democrat is no different than Hilary saying she is progressive.
Mr. or Ms. Philo,
You say, “As a voter, you should be questioning the superdelegate process as well. It diminishes the value of your vote.”
So, who should I complain to? Tad Devine, Bernie’s campaign manager? He created the superdelegate system.
Look it up.
Yeah, that’s right. He created it. Funny how the Bernie campaign watches as all you Bernie zealots complain that the fix is (supposedly) in because of the superdelegate system, without ever mentioning that the campaign manager himself created it.
I don’t care who created it. It stinks. It could be Judge Judy running against Bob Barker and I would still say it stinks. It’s not democracy when one person’s vote counts the same as 1/24 of the population.
Then call Bernie and ask him why he hired Devine — someone who I guess you’d call anti-democratic.
I did look it up. The Hunt Commission designed a process that was put into place in 1984, when Tad Devine was clerking for the Rhode Island courts, fresh out of college.
You may want to hold off on making a call at the risk of sounding foolish.
Wiki Tad Devine and Superdelegates to see what I found…
Someone on here thinks Bernie running as a Democrat is dishonest. That’s rich. I say Hillary running as Mrs. Clinton is more dishonest. If Hillary is elected Bill gets four more years with the interns.
Um . . . Mark W. needs to lay off the bong hits. The very wikipedia page on Tad Devine cited by Mark points out that he was born in 1955. So in 1982 he was 27. Maybe you were still in college at that age, but Devine wasn’t. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tad_Devine He was already out of college and out of law school.
Here are just 4 articles pointing out that Tad Devine is “the creator” of the Democratic Party superdelegate system:
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-elect…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-soboro…
http://www.whytuesday.org/category/what-ar…
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511…
He’s interviewed in these articles and acknowledges creating the system, so I don’t know what you’re thinking. Just because he was clerking for the Rhode Island Superior Court in 1982-83 doesn’t mean he wasn’t also working on implementing the superdelegate project in the 80s. http://www.wbur.org/npr/89369899
And not that it matters — because the rest of us learned that Wikipedia isn’t always reliable — but can you show me in the wiki article you cite on Devine where it says that he DIDN’T create the superdelegate system? (Hint: you can, because it doesn’t.)
That video the Clinton supporter pulled up is NOT one of Clinton’s closed door speeches. If it were, she’d obviously have no trouble releasing it. That was a speech to the Clinton Global Initiative, as the podium indicates, about some venture they and Goldman were involved with together. People gotta look a little deeper.