Vermont’s Republican lieutenant governor primary puts party affiliation to the test

Editor’s note: This story focuses on Vermont’s Republican candidates for lieutenant governor. VTDigger previously covered the Democratic candidates for the post.

Gregory Thayer, one of the two candidates in this year’s Republican primary race for lieutenant governor, spent several days last week at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee — where, he said, he was excited to join other Vermont GOP leaders in helping to nominate Donald Trump for another bid to the White House.

Vermont’s RNC delegates said they found a national party there forged in the former president’s image. But back in Vermont, where Trump is not particularly popular , this year’s lieutenant governor primary may well be a litmus test for the state’s GOP.

That’s in part because Thayer’s opponent in the race, which is Vermont’s only competitive Republican primary for statewide office this year, is distancing himself from the man who’s set to be at the top of the GOP ticket in the general election.

“I would never vote for Trump,” John Rodgers said in a recent interview.

Rodgers — who lives in Glover and runs a stonework and excavation business, as well as a hemp and cannabis farm — has only campaigned as a Republican for a matter of months . He’s better known for his nearly two decades, between 2003 and 2021, as a Democratic state lawmaker serving first in the House and then in the Senate. In 2018, he ran an unsuccessful write-in campaign for governor, again as a Democrat.

Meanwhile, Thayer — a Rutland accountant and former chair of that county’s GOP committee — has emphasized his own party ties. Thayer has also said previously that he was “proud” to have attended the Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C., that preceded the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He has maintained that he did not, however, enter the capitol building during the riot.

“I am the only Republican in this race,” Thayer said in a recent interview, adding that, as he sees it, his opponent “just woke up one day and decided to run as a Republican.”

It’s far more than that, Rodgers said. He contended that he entered the GOP primary because the state’s Democratic Party has “shifted far too much to the left” to include his politics.

Rodgers also said in an interview that he was prompted to run for lieutenant governor by several pieces of legislation that lawmakers pushed through this year, overriding vetoes from Republican Gov. Phil Scott. That includes a law updating Vermont’s renewable energy standard , which he said would unfairly burden ratepayers, and the annual property tax legislation that funds the state’s public school districts, which solidified an average projected property tax increase of 13.8% to pay for school budgets approved by local communities.

Although no longer a legislator, Rodgers did make his voice heard in the Statehouse this year. He helped lead two rallies at the capitol alongside a grassroots group that said it was, broadly, concerned about the Democratic supermajority and what members described as overtaxation and attacks on the state’s traditions of fishing, hunting and trapping.

“The Democratic Party, when I first entered politics in 2003, looked after working class and poor people,” Rodgers said in an interview. “And they don’t do that anymore.”

Still, Rodgers argued he has a history of crossing the political aisle in the Legislature and that he was eager to bring “moderate” Democrats into his fold. He pointed, for instance, to the crossover voters who identify as independents or Democrats but chose to take part in this year’s GOP presidential primary to vote for Nikki Haley .

Vermont was the only state where Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, defeated Trump, though she has since endorsed the former president’s reelection bid. Rodgers said the state was “wise” to spurn Trump. Thayer, meanwhile, suggested part of his role at the RNC was to correct for the role that crossover voters played in the primary.

“There is a fracture in the Republican Party between the moderates and the far right,” Rodgers said in an interview, characterizing Thayer as the latter and one of “the kind of guys that are giving our party a bad name.” He said that he thinks Thayer could “never” get elected in a statewide contest in Vermont.

Thayer mounted an unsuccessful primary bid for lieutenant governor two years ago — also against a veteran Northeast Kingdom state lawmaker, Caledonia County Republican Joe Benning. That race had other similarities to this year’s — Benning was also a vocal Trump critic and saw his race against Thayer as a symbol of division within the Republican Party.

Benning claimed more than 48% of the vote, while Thayer won about 40%. Benning went on to lose the general election to David Zuckerman, a Progressive/Democrat from Hinesburg who had previously served four years in the post but had subsequently left it.

Zuckerman is running for reelection this year, though he faces a primary challenge from Thomas Renner, who is a city councilor and the deputy mayor in Winooski.

While lieutenant governors can and often do use their position to advocate for certain issues, the post is largely ceremonial aside from the day-to-day responsibility of presiding over the state Senate when it’s in session.

Thayer said he was encouraged to seek the office again by people who want him to “keep fighting” for conservative values, which he identified as, among others, lowering taxes, slashing government regulation and centering parental rights in education.

He said he’s been “going out the last three, four years doing town halls — I’ve been out there listening and talking to the people. And I have those Republican values.”

Among those town halls, he noted, were a series of events he organized across the state to galvanize opposition to what he referred to as “critical race theory.”

In the general election this fall, “we need a real compare-and-contrast between candidates,” Thayer argued, describing a potential matchup with Zuckerman. “I’m to the right — and he’s to the left.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont’s Republican lieutenant governor primary puts party affiliation to the test .