(Host) The Progressive Party will have a larger presence at the Statehouse in January, with 6 members in the House and 2 in Senate.
But as VPR’s Bob Kinzel reports, the Party’s biggest impact on the 2010 election was its decision not to run a candidate for Governor – a move that some political observers believe helped elect Democrat Peter Shumlin.
(Kinzel) When Progressive Anthony Pollina ran as an independent candidate for governor in 2008, he received almost 70,000 votes.
In this year’s election, Democrat Peter Shumlin’s margin of victory over Republican Brian Dubie was roughly 4,300 votes.
St. Michael’s College political science professor Bill Grover says it’s reasonable to believe that any Progressive gubernatorial candidate would have gotten at least 10,000 votes this year.
But the Progressives made a conscious decision not to run a candidate because they strongly opposed the policies of Brian Dubie. Grover says that decision was more important in electing Shumlin than having high profile people like Vice President Joe Biden visit the state the day before the election.
(Grover) "If the Progressives had not made a decision to keep a candidate out of that race all those people coming back to Vermont for Peter Shumlin would not have given him the victory. So of course it was a tremendous gift to the Shumlin campaign. It’s an absolute certainty that Brian Dubie would have been governor if the Progressives had run a candidate."
(Kinzel) While Grover doesn’t think that Shumlin is "indebted" to the Progressives, he does believe that the Party will have an influence over Shumlin’s budget decisions as the state faces a 115 million dollar deficit.
(Grover) "Probably the role that Progressives would play would be to keep Democrats feet to the fire and remind them of what their principles are and then try to serve as kind of a somewhat of a conscience for them to make sure that if cuts happen they happen in a progressive in many senses of the word progressive direction."
(Kinzel) Morgan Daybell is the executive director of the Progressive Party. He says there are times to cooperate with the Democrats and there are times not to – 2010 was a time to cooperate:
(Daybell) "We’ve been a major party now for 10 years and we’re still feeling out the best way that we can affect political change and obviously we’re going to be running candidates when it makes sense but I think we’re trying to figure out when does it make sense to not run candidates."
(Kinzel) And Daybell says the decision by the Progressives not to run a candidate allowed the Party to highlight some key issues in the Democratic primary and the General Election.
(Daybell) "We came out early, putting Yankee on the table, putting health care on the table, putting the methodology we used to solve the budget problems on the table. I’m not sure that those issues would have been covered from our prospective as well as they were."
(Kinzel) Daybell says he’s optimistic about the future because several other Progressive House candidates ran strong races and lost by only relatively small margins.
For VPR News, I’m Bob Kinzel in Montpelier.