Republicans in towns across Vermont are meeting, beginning today, to start the party’s biennial reorganization.
Vermont law requires all major political parties in the state to reorganize every two years. The process begins at the town level, and party chairs must set a date for those caucuses to occur between September 10th and the 30th.
State Republican Party Chair Paul Dame says this begins a process to elect local and statewide party officials.
“Those town committees form the basic building block for the party. The towns will then send delegates to the county next month and then the counties will elect our state leaders as well in November.”
Dame notes the caucuses are choosing local leaders and are not intended to recruit candidates for upcoming elections.
“I think we certainly start getting a sense of where there’s more interest in a particular town in terms of voters getting more active. Sometimes the people who are getting involved right now start thinking about becoming candidates. But at the very least those are the people who are out there trying very hard to recruit candidates who can win in their district.”
Dame says the regular reorganization of the party keeps it aligned with voters’ preferences.
“We see who’s still interested, who’s still involved. And if folks aren’t, you know, those positions become open and it’s an opportunity for new people to get involved and steer the party in the direction that they think that it needs to go moving forward.”
While today is when Dame called for the town-level reorganization caucuses, some meetings will occur later this month.
“There’s some cases where a town will meet later and there’s provisions in state law for them to do that. And that’s just for towns that are currently organized. But I know we also have towns that have not been organized, at least in the ten years that I’ve been involved, who are in the process of getting organized right now.”
Dame believes that while having a single statewide caucus might be more efficient, these town and county meetings preserve local control.
“If you cut those different layers out and you just have a general statewide committee you lose what I think is a really important and critical element of success: having those party members know their towns and represent the issues from those towns back up to the state parties as well as also being the reflection of what Republicans want on the local level. And especially in Vermont we really like our politics local.”
The Vermont Democratic Party began their reorganization caucuses on September 10th. County caucuses will be held in October, and the state GOP is planning its statewide caucus in November.