By Shaun Robinson/VTDigger
In Vermont’s race for lieutenant governor a single label has been front and center.
Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, a Progressive/Democrat and produce farmer from Hinesburg, is facing a challenge from John Rodgers of Glover, a former state lawmaker who owns a stone excavation business and also runs a hemp and cannabis business, who is running as a Republican. The race is shaping up to be the most competitive at the statewide level this year.
The candidates know each other well, having served together in the Vermont House and Senate for more than a decade. Notably, they sat on the same side of the aisle during that period — Rodgers served as a Democrat before losing his Senate seat in 2020 to Republican Russ Ingalls.
In a well-financed bid to unseat his former colleague on Nov. 5, Rodgers has not shied away from the fact he swapped party labels. To the contrary, he’s made shedding the “D” beside his name a central tenet of his campaign.
“The Vermont Democratic Party, as I’ve said, has been taken over by the Progressives and has swung too far to the left,” said Rodgers. “They seem to believe that they can spend our money more wisely than we can,” he said, adding, “the taxes and fees are just out of control.”
He has told voters repeatedly, in debate forums and news interviews, that he no longer sees a home for what he says are his decidedly moderate — if somewhat populist — politics in state Democratic circles, angling to tap into discontent over large property tax increases in many towns.
Some of that discontent was on display at the Statehouse this year, where Rodgers helped lead two rallies alongside a loose coalition of people opposed to the Legislature’s Democratic supermajority and what they described as overtaxation and attacks on Vermont’s traditions of fishing, hunting and trapping.
The newly minted Republican has sought to model himself in the moderate vein of Vermont’s Republican Gov. Phil Scott, saying they both “have the same purpose in mind — and that’s building a system that Vermonters can afford.”
But Rodgers has also hesitated to fully embrace his new label.
“I changed the letter beside my name — literally, that’s all I did. I’m not a different person. I don’t have different values,” he said. “I don’t feel like I fit in any box,” he continued. “The ‘R’ is hard to carry because of the national Republican politics. It’s hard.”
Just like Scott, he’s disavowed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and tried to distance himself from the national party. Attempting to thread that needle has, he acknowledged, alienated some GOP voters.
Rodgers’ opponent, meanwhile, has zeroed in on his ambivalence. In debates and other forums this fall, Zuckerman has attempted to make Rodgers’ GOP affiliation a liability by tying him to Trump and vice presidential nominee JD Vance.
“People make choices, and [Rodgers] has chosen to join the Republican Party in this moment when the Republican Party is represented by Trump and his type of energy,” he said in an interview. “And many rational and reasonable people are leaving the Republican Party because of that.”
Zuckerman, who is running for a fourth term, has hammered this message in campaign emails in recent weeks.
“Just like Donald Trump, my opponent is offering few realistic, if any, solutions,” he wrote in one last week. The email subject line stated that both Rodgers and the former president have shown they were “not a serious man.”
In another missive, the lieutenant governor wrote that “just like JD, John Rodgers only recently embraced Donald Trump’s Republican Party,” referring to how Vance condemned his now-running mate in the past.
Zuckerman added, “Just like Vance, [Rodgers] decided to become a Republican after the Big Lie, the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the leader of their party said there were ‘good people on both sides’” during the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
Rodgers — who has been adamant he has never supported Trump in the past, and does not support the former president now — has balked at that messaging, accusing the lieutenant governor in recent debates of spreading “misinformation.”
He charged that Zuckerman is “willing to do and say anything, even if it hurts somebody that was supposed to be a friend, to hold on to office. And I am struggling with that.”
The Progressive/Democrat has argued that he is merely pointing voters to the facts. Zuckerman has charged in recent forums that Rodgers has been mischaracterizing his background, and the candidates have clashed over differences in their upbringing and personalities.
The advantages of linking a political opponent in Vermont to the former president are clear: Trump has been deeply unpopular in the state for years. He won just 31% of the vote in the 2020 election and 30% in the 2016 race.
This year, Vermont was the only state to award Nikki Haley a win in the Republican presidential primary, though her success was likely a product of independent voters and Democrats crossing over to take part in that GOP race, specifically.
Paul Dame, chair of the Vermont GOP, said he thinks Rodgers is a candidate who, like Haley, could encourage Democrats to split their ticket — in his view, something that would benefit candidates like Rodgers and Gov. Scott, who is also seeking reelection this year.
If Rodgers were to succeed, it would be a first in a long time. Since Scott was elected lieutenant governor, also as a Republican, in 2010 — and then, after six years in that office, made the jump to the state’s highest office in 2016 — no Republican has been able to win statewide office alongside him.
Dame contended that Rodgers’ 20-point margin of victory in this year’s GOP primary for lieutenant governor — 56% of the vote to just 35% for Gregory Thayer, a vocal Trump supporter who attended the Stop the Steal rally that preceded the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — shows that the state party is eager to support him.
Rodgers also has Scott’s endorsement in the lieutenant governor race. Dame said the two started appearing alongside each other in television ads in recent days.
“He’s part of this process of changing what the party looks like in Vermont,” Dame said of Rodgers. “That’s going to come by more intentionally modeling ourselves after Gov. Scott — and having the governor’s coordination this year in a way that’s been unprecedented.”
