In November, voters will elect Vermont’s statewide officers: governor, lieutenant governor, treasurer, auditor and secretary of state. They will also elect the only member of the U.S. House of Representatives for the state and the U.S. Senate seat held by Independent Bernie Sanders. In a quirk of state election law, one candidate won the GOP primaries for six offices on Aug. 14th. Wednesday, he officially withdrew from five contests and the Vermont Republican Party chose candidates for the remaining races.
The winner of the Republican primary for House, Senate, attorney general, auditor, treasurer and secretary of state was one person: H. Brooke Paige. He says he wanted to prevent Democratic crossover in the open primary. “My first objective was to prevent any Democrat from successfully winning the Republican primary which I did. Secondly it was my hope that after the primary was over I would be able to withdraw from most of those offices, not really wanting to try to mount 6 campaigns for the general election although there probably would have been some economy of scale involved in all of that, but um to allow other worthy candidates who hadn’t considered running. And so by withdrawing from all these races I had hoped the party would look for new and vibrant candidates for all these positions. And to some extent that happened.”
The Vermont Republican Party’s State Committee met Wednesday evening and elected five candidates for the general election. Richard Morton will challenge incumbent Treasurer Democrat Beth Pearce. Rick Kenyon was chosen to challenge incumbent Democrat/Progressive Auditor Doug Hoffer. Current St. Johnsbury House member Janssen Willhoit will run against Democratic Attorney General T.J. Donovan. Lawrence Zupan will face Incumbent Independent Senator Bernie Sanders. In the U.S. House GOP primary, Anya Tynio lost to Paige, but the party leadership has now chosen her to challenge incumbent Democrat Peter Welch. “It’s a huge vote of confidence in me from the GOP party and I’m grateful for the opportunity to continue my race against Peter Welch which was ultimately my goal when I began running. The fact that Mr. Paige resigned this position, he never had any intent to run for it in the beginning, so at this point I received a good number of votes, a little less than he did so he did win the primary, but I did have a great deal of support and obviously the support of the party so I feel that going forward there won’t be an issue with that.”
Paige hopes that the situation leads to change in how Vermont chooses candidates. “One of my big goals in all of this all along is to move Vermont away from an open primary system, which is the source of all the troubles here, to either a closed primary system where folks have to have a party identification in order to select which ballot they participate in in the primary or more importantly that we move away from a primary altogether to a caucus system. The party would make the rules and the processes by which they would select their slate of champions.”
But H. Brooke Paige is still in it for one race: he will challenge incumbent Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos in the general election.
