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Vermonters face an unusual choice in the Democratic primary for the state’s sole seat in the U.S. House. The three most high-profile candidates are all women — and, for an hour or two most weekdays, they can be found in the same room: the Vermont Senate chamber.
Seated in the front row is Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden, a former House member who represents the state’s most populous, wealthy and diverse county. At the podium is Lt. Gov. Molly Gray, a former assistant attorney general who serves as master of ceremonies in the otherwise powerless role of president of the Senate. And leading the body from a second-row seat is Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, D-Windham, who first arrived in the chamber in 2014 and was elected to the top job six years later.
Other candidates for the open House seat include Sianay Chase Clifford, a former congressional aide; Dr. Louis Meyers, a hospital physician at Rutland Regional Medical Center; and Liam Madden, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who helped lead Iraq Veterans Against the War.
Perhaps no congressional candidate’s current role carries as much promise and peril as Balint’s. As pro tem, she controls the pace and flow of legislation and wields a significant amount of influence and power in the building. But that political capital only goes so far — and expectations of her ability to deliver are high.
“There's a misconception that the pro tem universally runs the show in the Senate,” said Peter Sterling, who served as chief of staff to Balint’s predecessor as pro tem, Tim Ashe. “That’s just not the case.”
One example: When the Legislature reconvened in January, Balint publicly leaned on senators to take up the question of a statewide mask mandate. Just days later, she backpedaled, saying there was no point in engaging in “performative” legislation.
At the time, Balint blamed Gov. Phil Scott for being unwilling to reconsider his promise to veto any such legislation. But it was evident that key members of her own Democratic caucus had little enthusiasm for the policy.
Political campaigns are fundamentally about telling compelling narratives about a candidate and associating them with issues that strike a chord with voters. But as the Senate’s leader, according to Sterling, you “can’t make it about you.”
Senators expect you to meet their needs and keep the chamber functioning smoothly, not substitute your agenda for theirs. A rank-and-file senator might elicit eye rolls for being perceived as showboating, he said, but a pro tem would face “quick” and “severe” blowback for the same.
“If you're championing an issue or several issues, people automatically question your motives, assuming it's driven by electoral calculations and politics,” said Alex MacLean, who served as Peter Shumlin’s top aide and then-campaign manager when, as pro tem, he ran for governor in 2010. “That holds true for both constituents — Vermonters — but also your own members.”
Over the past two decades, Vermont’s legislative leaders have had mixed success running for higher office. Of the six sitting pro tems or House speakers who ran for statewide office in that period, only two won: Peter Welch, when he moved from the pro tem’s office to the U.S. House in 2006, and Shumlin, when he was elected governor four years later. (Welch is now vacating his seat to run for the U.S. Senate, which is why the post is open.)
During an earlier stint as pro tem, Shumlin lost a lieutenant gubernatorial election in 2002. Then-Speaker Gaye Symington fell short in the 2008 gubernatorial race, and her successor as speaker, Shap Smith, lost the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor in 2016. Four years after that, Ashe, too, was defeated in the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor.
Some of the biggest swings Balint has taken this session have fallen short in the very chamber she ostensibly leads. A push to end qualified immunity for police officers culminated in a bill so watered down that its biggest backers disowned it. After appearing in television ads touting a bill to bring ranked-choice voting to Vermont, Balint could not even get the legislation to the Senate floor. (Ram Hinsdale was also a high-profile supporter of both measures.)
Balint will nevertheless have highly visible achievements to campaign on when the Legislature adjourns later this spring. She co-sponsored and shepherded through the Senate Proposal 5, which would enshrine reproductive rights in Vermont’s constitution if the amendment is approved by voters in November. She negotiated the passage of Vermont’s first new gun control measures since 2018, a tightening of background check laws. And unless the governor vetoes a pension deal that passed the Senate unanimously — with Republican support — Balint will be able to say she helped defuse a political bomb and put the state’s retirement system on a more sustainable path.
But her wins are shared accomplishments, and ones that largely reflect a willingness to compromise. Balint has embraced this as a strength and leaned into her ability to put ego aside to get deals done. On the debate stage and in interviews with the press, she often calls herself a “proven progressive” who will do the “hard work in the quiet rooms” necessary to get to yes.
But decisions made to strike bargains often do not please all parties.
“When you're in legislative leadership, you cannot keep everybody happy,” said Symington, the former House speaker who ran for governor in 2008. “Ain't gonna happen.”
And, indeed, Ram Hinsdale, who is branding herself as the left’s choice in the primary, is already attempting to turn Balint’s penchant for consensus-building and negotiation into a liability. The Chittenden County Democrat would not work “in the quiet rooms after hours,” Ram Hinsdale pointedly told the audience during a candidate forum in March.
“I do the work on the Statehouse steps with you. I do the work in the streets. I do the work side by side with working Vermonters and people struggling, and that’s where the work needs to be done,” she said, later excerpting the clip and tweeting it out to her followers.
Ram Hinsdale, meanwhile, has deftly used her Senate perch to create a narrative about the kind of U.S. House member she would be. And, unlike Balint, she does not have to worry about achieving consensus with her colleagues or making the unpopular decisions necessary to keep the Senate running.
Nowhere has this been more evident than with S.148, an environmental justice bill that would require the state to take into account the disproportionate environmental burdens faced by marginalized communities when implementing and crafting environmental policies.
“When I was young and our fortunes turned and we moved from an oceanside community much further into Los Angeles, we moved somewhere that was equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day just to breathe the air,” she told her Senate colleagues in an impassioned floor speech in March.
Most states already have some sort of environmental justice law on the books, and Ram Hinsdale had first tried to pass a similar measure back in 2007, back when she served in the House.
By the time S.148 made it to the Senate floor, the bill had been stripped of most of its funding to pay for dedicated personnel, although a sizable appropriation remains to pay for a tool that would map the heightened risk of environmental hazards on marginalized communities. Upon its tentative approval by the upper chamber, Ram Hinsdale wasted no time in putting out a press release to herald the bill’s passage.
“A lot of legislation is passing that I have worked on for a long time, and so it feels like a really meaningful and effective way to cap off a decade in the Legislature,” she told VTDigger in an interview last week. She also pointed to S.250, a criminal justice reform bill that would most notably create a centralized repository for so-called Giglio or Brady letters, which are filed when a law enforcement officer’s credibility is called into question.
Although she would ultimately vote to send the watered-down qualified immunity bill over to the House, Ram Hinsdale voted against an amendment that stripped the legislation of most of its impact. In a sharply worded speech on the Senate floor, she told her Senate colleagues about the first time, at 13, she interacted with law enforcement.
“The first two questions I was asked were: Are you Mexican? And: Are you sure you're not Mexican?” Ram Hinsdale said. “It sounds funny, and yet that is a very, very common experience for someone who looks like me in America.”
Observers frequently say they struggle to see the daylight between the different candidates’ policy positions. But Ram Hinsdale is banking that by weaving her personal story together with her legislative record, she will win over a left-leaning base.
It’s hard to know at this point if this is working. Very little public polling is conducted in Vermont (the first and last one surveying the House race, released in January by Vermont Public Radio and Vermont PBS, did not even include Ram Hinsdale, who had not yet declared). And the latest quarterly filings detailing fundraising and spending are not due to the Federal Election Commission until later this week. But Ram Hinsdale espouses confidence and points to a spate of labor endorsements.
“We are demonstrating that our coalition is the intersection of labor, climate and social justice,” she said.
Some, such as Welch, have successfully made the leap from legislative leadership to statewide office. But Andrew Savage, who served as Welch’s top state Senate aide before joining his congressional campaign in 2006, still remembers how surprised some on Welch’s team were when they learned, early in the race, just how few Vermonters knew who Welch even was. Influence in the Capitol, as it turns out, does not necessarily translate into statewide name recognition.
“Your presence in the building — in the Statehouse — is just very different from what voters are seeing and the exposure that voters have to candidates. And so I think that puts a premium on getting out of Montpelier,” Savage said.
Of course, legislative posts — especially now that the Legislature is back in the physical Statehouse — preclude candidates from doing just that much of the time. This is a problem for Ram Hinsdale, who is stuck in the building for the entire working day Tuesday through Friday (the Legislature is not in session on Mondays), but even more so for Balint, whose Mondays also include back-to-back meetings with the governor’s office, House Speaker and legislative staff.
“Running for a statewide office and being a legislative leader are both really, really hard, demanding jobs, and doing both at the same time — it's grueling,” MacLean said.
“I wish I could clone myself,” Balint said last Thursday morning in a brief interview that began with her apologizing for only having 10 minutes to spare. (Her campaign manager, also apologetic, later offered to find more time in her schedule later in the day.)
This year’s races kicked into gear after U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., announced his retirement, prompting Welch to seek his seat. But the news that Leahy would step down came as a shock to Balint, who said she had believed — and hoped — that she might have a few more years as the Senate’s leader before a congressional seat opened up. (She began her tenure as pro tem in January of 2021, the height of the pandemic, as lawmakers were still adjusting to a new remote reality.)
“I got the call about an hour before that press conference that (Leahy) was going to be announcing, and I was not expecting that,” she said. “I was literally speechless.”
When it comes to face time with voters, one candidate has a distinct advantage over Balint and Ram Hinsdale: Gray, a Burlington Democrat who is also the only candidate to have already run and won statewide. (Ram Hinsdale has also run statewide — for lieutenant governor in 2016 — but did not win.)
In contrast to Balint and Ram Hinsdale, Gray has a less encumbered schedule. The lieutenant governor’s responsibilities are almost entirely ceremonial — aside from gaveling the Senate in and out and settling parliamentary questions, they are required to do little else. (They can vote to break ties in the Senate; this has never happened during Gray’s tenure.)
Given the dearth of actual responsibilities or power over legislation or the budget, Gray has wasted no time getting out of Montpelier to talk to regular people about the policies they’d like to see enacted.
Similarly to Balint and House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, Gray went on a 14-county “Recover Stronger” tour of the state to ask Vermonters about how they’d like to see the state’s federal relief dollars spent. During the session, she has also hosted regular “Seat at the Table” panels with constituents and local leaders about a variety of issues, including Ukraine, youth mental health, and paid leave.
Since she does not have to vote on or sponsor legislation, Gray’s role also allows her to mostly pick and choose when to weigh in on policy, unless pressed by the media. And usually she keeps away from matters of controversy.
But there has been one very notable exception. Last year, Gray was the first top Democrat to break with a deeply controversial pension overhaul offered by House lawmakers. The move deeply embittered many lawmakers against her. But it could come in handy if the Vermont State Employees’ Association — one of the state’s largest public-sector unions — decides to endorse a candidate in the primary.
Gray’s campaign declined an interview request last week. Her campaign manager, Samantha Sheehan, said Gray was focusing on her recovery after testing positive for Covid — though the candidate managed to record a video Tuesday thanking Vermonters for their well-wishes — and offered only to reply to written questions.
Lieutenant governor is widely considered a plum post from which to run for higher office. In fact, every Vermonter who has held the position in the last two decades has done so. Doug Racine, Brian Dubie and David Zuckerman all made failed bids for the governor’s office. Scott successfully made the jump from the No. 2 spot to the fifth floor.
MacLean, the former Shumlin aide who now works as a lobbyist, thinks there’s “more peril than promise” running for higher office when you’re in legislative leadership. But she thinks the script is flipped for the LG, who enjoys a highly visible platform and few of the downsides that come with actually being in charge of getting legislative work done.
“You don't have all of these other difficult aspects — making tough decisions, upsetting various constituencies and the difficult logistics of doing both,” she said.
The Legislature typically adjourns in early May, and the primary is Aug. 9. But early voting starts June 25, which means that the candidates will only have at most six weeks to dedicate full-time to campaigning before some Vermonters start sending in their ballots.
That timeline is markedly different than the one Welch experienced back in 2006, when he captured the House seat from the pro tem’s perch. He faced no major primary challenge — and effectively had seven months to campaign between the Legislature’s adjournment and the November election.
The coming weeks before this year’s adjournment, particularly for Balint and Ram Hinsdale, are extraordinarily high-stakes, as they attempt to cement their legislative legacies before facing the voters at the polls. But one question may be looming in the back of their minds: How quickly, exactly, can they get out of there?
Read the story on VTDigger here: 3 leading congressional candidates serve together in the Vermont Senate. Their respective roles might make or break their campaigns. .