Theo Wells-Spackman is a Report for America corps member who reports for VTDigger.
On election night in November 2024, a red wave crashed over the Vermont Senate.
In a single evening, the GOP shattered Democratic supermajorities in both legislative chambers and nearly doubled conservative membership in the Senate to gain Republicans’ highest share of power there since 2000.
“Certainly the biggest thing to rectify,” Vermont Democratic Party Chair Lachlan Francis said wryly of his party’s strategy this fall, “is winning.”
Weeks ahead of Election Day, leaders across the political spectrum are watching a number of competitive Senate races closely. While Democrats seek to make up ground in Montpelier as the national party gains momentum in midterm polling, Republicans want to build on their newfound legislative clout to flip control of the chamber for the first time in decades.
For former Sen. Chris Bray, an Addison County Democrat who served nearly two decades in the Statehouse and was among those voted out on Nov. 5, 2024, the outcome wasn’t entirely surprising. As “shock and dismay” rolled in from his legislative colleagues through texts, calls and emails, Bray said in an interview last week, he reflected on a deep uneasiness he’d felt over much of the six-month campaign.
The former Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee chair recalled warning colleagues during a June 2024 veto session that “people are upset and angry” over property tax spikes in particular. Conservative messaging around the Legislature’s role in that problem, Bray argued, was “unfair and inaccurate” and took advantage of a poorly understood issue for the electorate.
Ultimately, the political fallout was intense, with Republican Gov. Phil Scott conducting an “orchestra” of affordability-focused messaging, according to state GOP Chair Paul Dame.
Nationwide, Republicans managed to flip roughly 50 state legislative seats that evening. Twenty-six were in Vermont, according to a post-election report written in part by Francis.
Alongside Bray, then-Sen. Mark MacDonald, D-Orange, whom voters had sent to the Legislature for three cumulative decades, lost decisively to GOP challenger Larry Hart. Republican Pat Brennan flipped the Grand Isle County seat long held by the late center-left veteran Dick Mazza. And three more seats turned red, adding now-Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck to the chamber representing Caledonia County, as well as Sen. Chris Mattos and former Sen. Sam Douglass on behalf of the Chittenden North district and Orleans district, respectively.
Beck said in an interview recently that his party’s wins in 2024, which brought GOP Senate membership to 13 out of 30, placed outright control of the chamber “much more within reach.” And if Republicans are making a pitch to control the legislative agenda in the Senate for the first time since 1996, he said, it’s more important than ever for voters to understand the caucus’s priorities.
Beck has been a central architect of Senate Republicans’ Vermont Promise campaign this year, which lays out a slate of goals ranging from property tax reforms to repealing the state’s “Raise the Age” law that routes young adults charged with most offenses through juvenile delinquency proceedings instead of criminal court.
For Dame, part of the effect of Vermont Promise is to separate his party from national Republicans, who face what he called a negative environment.
“I think it sets up that contrast,” Dame said, adding that the policy slate concentrates on the issues over which state legislators have the most direct control.
Beck, for his part, said national GOP policies did not figure into the campaign’s creation. He and his colleagues simply sought to lay out their plans for controlling Vermonters’ costs, among other goals, he said. Beck faces a challenge in the general election from Democrat David Roth.
The anti-incumbent sentiment that Democrats experienced in 2024 may be a factor again this November, according to Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast, who serves as Senate majority leader. But this time, she said, Republican lawmakers and the governor in particular have had considerably more policy influence to answer for in the last two years.
“I don’t think any political party can rest on their laurels and say, ‘Those are our red voters, or our blue voters,’” she said in an interview.
For Francis, the Trump administration’s influence in recent years — including broad cuts to social services, fuel price increases during the Iran war and a continuing trade conflict with Canada — are sure to have a local electoral impact in November. State lawmakers, he said, can make a difference to Vermonters’ pocketbooks one way or another, regardless of their ability to intervene in national or international affairs.
“Everywhere you go, people are seeing the ripple effects of federal policy, and it’s affecting negatively their community,” he said. “I think there’s no doubt that’s going to motivate people of like mind with Democrat candidates to get out and vote.”
When national Republicans gained momentum across the country in 2024, Ram Hinsdale said, some Vermont conservatives were “happy to ride that wave.” Now, she said, “They have to take a side.”
Ram Hinsdale faces a challenge this fall from Republicans Bruce Roy, Javen Sears and Rohan St. Marthe in the three-seat Chittenden Southeast district.
‘The greatest vulnerability and the greatest opportunity’
Addison County is the state’s only Senate district with both Democratic and Republican representation.
Strategists agreed that the race for the district’s two seats may be the most closely watched contest of the cycle. Republican Sen. Steve Heffernan, who overcame Bray two years ago, and Democratic Sen. Ruth Hardy face two well-funded challenges from political newcomers Hannah Sessions and Andrew Klein.
“It’s sort of like the greatest vulnerability and the greatest opportunity at the same time,” said Dame of his party’s newfound half-grip on the Addison district.
For East Middlebury’s Hardy, 2024 represented a particular moment of political anger over property taxes and several other issues.
Although those concerns have not dissipated, “I don’t think it means that there’s a shift overall in Addison County,” she said in an interview, adding that issues like childcare and education reform have been her focus during her Senate tenure. “This year, I’m feeling a different feel, you know? I think people are scared about what’s happening at the federal level. They’re worried about losing their rights.”
Sessions, a Democrat who owns a goat dairy farm and cheese operation in Leicester, agreed.
“The big picture is one that we can’t ignore,” she said, pointing to new tariffs’ effects on local economies and to the end of expanded federal healthcare subsidies.
Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was part of what pushed her toward political work in the first place, Sessions added. A “rural-urban divide” by Vermont’s definitions that she saw emerging around land use and agriculture has also been a factor.
“Being a farmer that’s a Democrat, I thought that I could be useful in, you know, approaching some of these really sensitive topics,” Sessions said in a recent interview.
Klein, who spent years in finance and real estate before moving to Vermont and serving as a lieutenant with the Middlebury Fire Department and technical rescue team, enters the race as a self-described “Rockefeller Republican.” In the past, the New Haven resident has essentially been a fiscally conservative Democrat while living in New York and Connecticut, he said in an interview — and none of his beliefs has changed.
“I’d never make it through the primary as a Democrat,” Klein said, adding “it’s not like I shoehorned myself in there — I actually am a Vermont centrist Republican.”
And within the dynamics of the county, he feels his goals — which include pushing for financial efficiency on services like education while acknowledging the state’s