 Welcome again. All right, everyone, please turn off your cell phones. And I want to give you a little heads up about the luncheon that is on the last Friday of November. It is a luncheon that we hold in Brand Hall. It's a winter luncheon. It's going to be a delicious dinner. It costs $15 for members. And if you are not a member but want to stay for the lecture, it will cost you $20, $5 for the lecture. The lecture will start as usual at two o'clock after the luncheon. So please sign up today. If you want to come tomorrow, I mean next Friday is the last day to pay. So you can come and enjoy the luncheon, but you really have to pay for it. We charge that amount because we have to pay extra for the kitchen. And after this lecture, I'm going to learn how to use the dishwasher. Glory be. So it's not a money raiser, it's a break-even, and it's a lot of fun. So now, Michael, if you would introduce our speaker, who must have been very busy since Tuesday. Please an honor to welcome Peter Hirschfeld back to Tripoli. As many of you know, Peter has been a political reporter for Vermont Public Radio for the past seven years, covering state government and the Vermont legislature. He's based in VPR's Capital Bureau in Montpelier, just conveniently across the street from the State House. Before coming to VPR, Peter covered state government for the Rutland Herald and the Barry Montpelier Times Argus. He began his journalistic career in 2003 as a local sports reporter and copy editor at the Times Argus. Peter grew up in nearby Jericho, Vermont, and he's a graduate of Colby College in Waterville, Maine. The extremely timely topic of today's talk is Election Day Post Mortem. How the politics of 2018 could shape Vermont's policies of the future. Please join me in very warmly welcoming Peter Hirschfeld. Thanks so much. And thank you all for having me. And the reason this is so timely is because the person that works so hard to put these events on, Beth Wood has such a fine sense of when to schedule these. And I just want to thank Beth in absentia for all the work that she does to put these talks on. I'm really grateful for her work for all of this. I know you all are too, and we're all wishing her a speedy, if long recovery, I know. So we have an election on Tuesday, and there were a lot of people in my business who were writing this particular election in Vermont off as not a terribly big deal, not something that people were getting too excited about. I had a colleague that wrote a story in August who wrote, quote, this campaign is remarkable for how sleepy it is. And that wasn't true as it turned out. More than 55% of registered voters cast ballots this year, and that might not sound like a lot compared to turnout in other countries, but here in Vermont, believe it or not, that is the highest percent turnout in the history of Vermont for a non-presidential year. So people were watching, people were interested, and people cared a lot as it turns out about the candidates that were running, the platforms they were running on. But when you look at the results of this election, it's frankly a little bit difficult to understand exactly what they cared about when they cast those ballots and what it is they want their elected officials to do and why is that so difficult? It's difficult because voters sent two very contradictory messages on Tuesday. On the one hand, they gave Republican Governor Phil Scott another term in office and they didn't just re-elect Phil Scott, they gave him a decisive 15-point victory over his Democratic challenger, Christine Hallquist. On the other hand, they saw fit to give Democrats and progressives a supermajority in both chambers of the Vermont legislature. Republicans lost 10 seats in the Vermont House. Nobody saw that coming, frankly. We expected there might be a little bit of a shift, but nothing on the order of that. We saw Democrats pick up 12 seats in the Vermont House. That's a 22-seat swing from what we saw in this past session to what we're going to see in January and it is going to alter the dynamic in some potentially fundamental ways in Montpelier. I spent my Tuesday night at the Vermont Democratic Party's election night event in Burlington. I don't know if you've ever been to one of these events. They're quite the spectacle. I encourage you to check it out sometime if you don't have anything better to do on an election night. They hold it in a giant conference room at Hilton Hotel in downtown Burlington. There's a stage for candidates to give their speeches. There's a cash bar. There's a giant projection screen with CNN on it and the crowd cheers wildly when some AP calls a race for a Democrat, groan when they call it for a Republican. I ran into a Democratic legislator there and I was talking to him about these results. I've been talking to a lot of people just to help me reconcile what we saw on Tuesday. He said to me, off the record, I should mention, he said, and I'll quote, how can voters be smart enough to put so many Democrats into the house and stupid enough to put Phil Scott in the governor's office? Now, I can assure you there were people over at the Republican election night headquarters event just a few miles away who were saying the exact same thing. How could they be so smart to elect Phil Scott and so dumb to put these Democrats in office? But, you know, that's a thread, sort of the psychology of the voter in making these decisions. It's something I want to revisit later in this talk because it's really a fascinating case in voter psychology and I think there's something for us to learn from that. But the title of this talk, of course, is how politics of 2018 could shape Vermont's policies of the future. And so that's where I want to start. And the answer to that question, of course, is very complicated. There are a number of big issues that elected officials are going to be dealing with in Montpelier over the next two years. Education spending is a big one, of course, and it's a big one because that's the place where Phil Scott has really tried to make his mark on Vermont policy during his first term in office. Specifically, he wants to curb the rate of growth in spending in the kindergarten through 12th grade portion of the public education system, and then he wants to use savings from that to make new investments in things like childcare subsidies, things like early education, and also on the other end of the spectrum, higher education. He wants there to be subsidies available for people who want to go to college, for people who want to learn a trade after high school. Another major issue heading into 2019 is going to be funding for water quality. We have serious water quality issues in this state. We're in Chittenden County right now. I imagine most of you are from right around here, and so you're pretty well familiar with some of the pollution issues that major water bodies are seeing in this state. It's going to cost Vermont $2 billion over the next 20 years to take care of those problems. Under the existing revenue structure we have now, only about $1 billion is going to be coming in. That means we're going to have to figure out some way to come up with another $50 million. Every year, over the next 20 years, to accomplish the task, and that is a lot of money by any measure, and certainly so in Vermont. Two other major issues that you no doubt have heard a lot about of late. One, $15 minimum wage. The other, paid family leave. The $15 minimum wage concept is relatively straightforward. Democrats want to pass a law that would require all employers in the state to pay their workers at least $15 an hour. This would affect somewhere on the order of 60,000 people in the state of Vermont, and it would have the effect of increasing payroll costs in the state for the private sector, somewhere in the vicinity of $280 million a year. It's a big number. It actually turns out to be only about $4,500 a year for each of those 60,000 workers. We'll make a big difference for them, but we're not talking about huge amounts of new money coming into people's personal lives. The paid family leave legislation would require every worker in the state to pay a new payroll tax. It's about $70 a year on average per worker, and all that money goes into a statewide pool, and if you have a baby or you get seriously ill or injured or you have a family member that you need to tend to, you could take six to 12 weeks of work off and still get 70% of your pay, and that money would come from this pool that's funded by the payroll tax. So how do the elections that just happen affect these policy issues? Well, let's begin with minimum wage and paid family leave, because I think these two issues in some way exemplify the ideological differences between the Republican governor and the Democratic lawmakers that now so control the House and the Senate in Vermont. Democrats very generally believe that government should be used as a force to improve the lives of the people it represents, right? That government should intervene in very direct and palpable ways that will resolve the financial struggle that low and even middle-class workers face. They say, hey, what better way to intervene than to simply say to businesses, look, guys, you're gonna have to start paying your employees more. We're gonna require you to. And during this past session, that is exactly what Democrats did in both the House and the Senate. They passed a bill that would gradually increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour. It wasn't going to be an overnight thing. The minimum wage right now is $10.50 an hour. The bill that they passed would increase it to $15 an hour by 2024, so it would give us six years to get there. The House and the Senate also passed a paid family leave bill, and this would have accessed a payroll tax on workers somewhere on the order of one, one-half of 1%, I think I have that right, and the money would be used to fund the paid family leave program. As most of you probably know by now, the governor vetoed both of those bills. Phil Scott says, look, it's not that I don't want people to get $15 an hour. I do. It's not that I don't want new mothers to be able to take time at home with their newborns while being paid. He says I do want that. But he says we can't just will these things into existence by forcing employers to pay more or by forcing employees to pay a payroll tax that the vast majority of workers, frankly, probably wouldn't see any direct benefit from. What not surprisingly takes the view that we need to empower the free market to deliver these outcomes on their own and that we can encourage that to happen by relieving regulatory burdens on them, for instance, by easing the amount of taxes that they have to pay, where you create an environment where wages rise naturally, where businesses are compelled to give more generous benefits packages because they have more money to work with. So Phil Scott vetoes these bills. And during the last session, that was absolutely the end of the road. No chance for these bills to get passed under a Phil Scott veto. And why? Because Republicans had 53 seats in the House of Representatives and they were in the minority for sure. But 53 is a very important number because you only need 50 votes in the Vermont House to be able to sustain a governor's veto. That's a super minority. And that's the threshold. And that means Republican lawmakers served as this kind of, you know, backstop that Democrats were going to be unable to break through. And it gave Phil Scott this inescapable power over the fate of a lot of legislation that Democrats wanted to pass. And the use of that veto pen is a power that Phil Scott exploited quite a bit. He issued 14 vetoes during his first term in office. The most since Governor Howard Dean. Next year is going to be a very different story because of what happened on Tuesday. Now there are only 43 Republicans in the Vermont House of Representatives. If you take Democrats and progressives combined, they have 102 seats in the Vermont House of Representatives. And that is a veto-proof majority. I should just note here as an aside that we have the Senate too, right? They're an important body in this. But the dynamic there hasn't really shifted all that much after Tuesday. Democrats had 23 seats. Last year they're going to have 24 this year. So basically the same fundamental dynamic is playing out there. And so the initial thought is, hey, looks like Democrats might be able to use their ability to override this veto to push forward all these things they weren't able to move forward with because of Phil Scott's veto power. Not so fast. It is true that Democrats by and large favor $15 minimum wage. It's also true that Democrats by and large favor paid family leave. But Democrats are not a monolith. They do not vote in a reliably unified block. And I've talked to quite a few Democratic legislators since Tuesday, and I put this question to them. Now that you have 102 votes, does it mean that minimum wage and paid family leave are a done deal in 2019? And the answer from them is far from it. And in fact, I don't know that even many of them think that that's the likely outcome next year. And to understand why it's useful to take a look at the numbers in the votes for both of those bills during the last session. The minimum wage bill passed. It passed by a count of 77 to 69. Extremely close. Democrats really had to work to get that over the finish line. And remember, there were only 53 Republicans in the House then. That means that 16 Democrats and independents voted against the minimum wage bill. The paid leave vote was a little more comfortable for Democrats. I think they got 84 yes votes on that. But under any circumstance, they're going to need 100 to override the governor's veto. And I haven't talked to anyone that's confident that the Democrats are going to be able to muster those votes. A lot can change between April and May, which is when we would see an attempt at a veto ride, assuming that Democrats decide to move those bills again next year. And as of now though, notwithstanding this change in the partisan dynamic in Montpelier, it looks like this election is going to deliver to us the same result in 2019 that we saw in 2018, which is where you have Democratic majorities looking to push through these sort of socially progressive labor bills. A Republican governor that is going to veto them and just not enough people in the State House to overturn that veto power. Status quo, in the other words. And you know, elections matter and we say this and it's a cliche, but it really is so true. And I feel like this is one glaring example of that. Had Christine Hallquist won the race for governor, I can guarantee you, Vermont would in very short order, I can't guarantee anything actually, but I can say with a high degree of confidence that Vermont would in very short order be, I believe the first state in the country to have both a $15 minimum wage and a mandatory paid family leave program for its workers. Two controversial economic policies, two incredibly substantial and impactful economic policies. No matter where you stand on those policies, I think we can all agree they would have a big impact on the state for better or for worse. And because Christine Hallquist did not win, we will not see that happening or we aren't as likely to see that happen. So I just gave you two examples where Phil Scott's veto power will remain very relevant going into 2019. A place where he still has the ability to kind of unilaterally impose his will on the policy direction of this state. But there are going to be areas over the next year, over the next two years where this new legislative dynamic really does undercut the governor's power over the state purse strings and over budget policies specifically. And that is going to come most notably in the area of the state budget and specifically the area of the state budget that relates to education spending. I mentioned earlier that Phil Scott spent his first two years in office focusing primarily on ways to reduce costs in the kindergarten through 12th grade education system. And let's just go back so we can all remind ourselves just how aggressively Phil Scott has attempted to do that. Phil Scott delivered his first budget address in January of 2017, just a few months after he was elected. And he had kind of mentioned the idea of school spending during his campaign, but hadn't thrown out any super specific plans for how he was going to go about reducing those expenditures. So it's an understatement to say that he caught a lot of people off guard when he said during this budget address that, you know how we're going to reduce costs? We are going to mandate from on high here in Montpelier that school budgets, local school budgets cannot be any bigger next year than they were this year. Easy. Done. We passed this law here in Montpelier. Tell local boards to make it so and we've solved our spending problem virtually overnight. There was of course one problem with that plan, which is that school boards had already approved the budgets that were going to go to local voters, not just approve them, but they'd been printed out. Budget vote meetings had been warned and those school budgets as it turned out were going up on average by 3% and Phil Scott just wanted them to go back to the drawing board, figure out a way to reduce costs and come back to voters with 0% increases in those budgets. Democratic lawmakers were appalled by this proposal. You could see the looks on their faces as he was making his speech, announcing this proposal and they dismissed it out of hand. They said, no way. Phil Scott's gone crazy. They said, yes, and it didn't happen. But it set the stage and the tone for the two sessions that would follow. Phil Scott comes to the table with a big proposal that Democrats haven't heard much about until the moment that he shows it to them and generally the media at the same time and angry Democrats would kind of yell them out of the room and say, this is a non-starter. We can't compromise with you even because we don't know where to begin with this. This past session, Phil Scott threw out a different idea that was about as popular in the state house as his plan for budget caps and this time he said, let's just tell schools they can't have as many teachers and other staff as they have right now. Staff is expensive. It's true. Payroll costs account for about 80% of all education spending and Phil Scott said, let's do this. Let's set a staff to student ratio that we say schools can't exceed and then we'll force them to reduce the number of people working there. Presto change, Joe. We say $500 million a year in education costs. We use a bunch of that money to invest in other important areas of state government and we're all the better for it. Democrats, as you remember, said nothing doing. This isn't going to happen. We're not going to go along with your plan. But Phil Scott had an ace in the hole and this was his veto power. So instead of trying to cajole democratic lawmakers into going along with his education spending plan he said if you don't move in my direction don't give me a significant portion of what I want I'm going to veto the state budget you send me. It wasn't that Phil Scott had a problem with the state budget per se but it was a fine and powerful piece of leverage for him to be able to use. And he said I'm going to use this leverage I'm going to exploit it to try to force Democrats to concede ground on some of these education spending reforms that they wouldn't otherwise have even considered doing. And that's exactly what Phil Scott did and you all remember this, I'm sure he vetoed the first budget lawmakers sent him, this past session and then he vetoed the second one they sent him and we saw quite a game of brinksmanship as June wore on and we came very close to the beginning of a new fiscal year without having a budget in place and so Vermont for the first time anybody could remember faced this unprecedented prospect of a government shutdown which was something a lot of people just didn't think could ever happen in a place like Vermont where we have a reputation rightly or wrongly as having elected officials who are willing to work across the aisle no matter the party they belong to and Phil Scott was able to extract some pretty significant concessions from Democrats as a result of this he convinced them to use surplus and one time money to lower property tax rates, it's something that a lot of Democrats were very viscerally opposed to but they felt like they had no other option because if they continued to say no and they called Phil Scott's bluff then Vermont was going to find itself on July 1 without a state budget state parks about to open road projects needing to get done and there wouldn't be any money to pay for any of it now Republicans only have 43 seats and unlike the issues I was talking about earlier minimum wage, paid family leave Democrats and progressives really did have a united front on this budget standoff with Phil Scott and Republicans needed every one of those 53 votes to be able to sustain the governor's veto so that means now with Democrats and progressives holding 102 seats instead of the 93 they had last year they can override his veto when it comes to disagreements over the budget what does that mean it probably means that Phil Scott is going to have to take a more collaborative approach with the Democrat-controlled legislature he can no longer say it's my way or the highway he can't use the veto threat credibly under a lot of circumstances because Democrats are going to be able to form very interesting coalitions within their own caucus within the independent caucus within the progressive caucus make sure that they have enough votes to thwart Phil Scott I can assure you that if Democratic leadership in the House had last session had the option of either compromising with fellow Democrats to get them to override the budget instead of having to figure out a compromise with Phil Scott they certainly would have chosen the former and you know it's interesting I feel like Democrats have to respect the fact that Phil Scott won his election by 15 points it's a significant victory for him and voters are pretty clearly saying that in broad terms and very generally they support the fiscal vision that Phil Scott brings to the table in Vermont Phil Scott conversely has to respect I think the fact that voters have also seen the wisdom of giving Democrats a veto-proof majority in both chambers of the legislature and when I listened to Phil Scott's victory speech on Tuesday I was struck by the tone you would think a guy who just won his reelection bid by 15 points would be triumphant boisterous, excited enjoying the thrill of victory but Phil Scott honestly sounded more chastened than anything he was really lamenting the Republican losses in the House I know that his political team thought that Vermonters by and large favored the ideas he was putting forward in the State House and that voters would see Democrats as an impediment to Phil Scott having his way and that they would as a result vote out a lot of the Democrats put more Republicans in the House to increase the likelihood that Phil Scott's vision for reducing education spending could finally be realized just the opposite happened right this idea that voters were going to be angry at liberal lawmakers for thwarting Phil Scott did not turn out to be the case Phil Scott had a line in his speech on Tuesday where he said and this is a direct quote here in electing the governor of one party in a legislature of another and I think what he meant to us tonight is clear work together so as of right now those are just words in a speech politicians say a lot of words and a lot of speeches and they don't necessarily always mean anything but I think Phil Scott actually does mean what he said on Tuesday I think the relationship between Phil Scott and Democratic lawmakers has been extraordinarily strained no matter which side you talk to and I think Phil Scott really does understand based on the outcome of Tuesday's election that his administration is going to have to make a much stronger effort to collaborate with Democratic lawmakers in a way that they either haven't been able to or willing to during these first two years and I think on the other side I think there are a lot of Democratic lawmakers maybe we overshot our bounds as well maybe there's ways in which we could change our approach to working with the administration that would foster a more collaborative working relationship I've talked off the record with a number of key legislators who have said that their dislike of Scott's team has really kind of gotten visceral, you know it's almost personal and that the well has been poisoned and I think the poisoning of that well is in some ways the result of this political dynamic in Montpelier that has encouraged each party to decide we're going to try to go our own way Scott can issue a veto because he knows he has the Republicans who will sustain the votes and Democrats get so upset by this veto threat that their ability to work with the governor is hampered in a lot of ways so they both end up hating each other so much that they just can't find a way to work together it's amazing to me how much ego and hubris figure into what happens in Montpelier and you think these are elected officials these people level headed big thinkers to get into a room set aside their own personal feelings and personal pride and come to an agreement that works best for most Vermonters and I'll tell you it's amazing how much pride gets in the way of people working together up there and that's I guess just part of what it means to be human those vices get in the way of us working well together we have this new environment now though it's amazing how much pride can really force the other to do what it wants them to do and when you can't force somebody to do something you have to coax them into doing it and you have to make accommodations and maybe I'm being polyannish about this but I think there's a scenario where Phil Scott and Democrats are able to work together in ways that have eluded them during their first two years since Phil Scott has been elected the last time a legislature overrode a governor's budget veto was in 2009 and that was actually the first time a governor ever had vetoed a budget Jim Douglas was the governor he was a Republican of course Shapp Smith was the new Speaker of the House Peter Shumlin was the president of the Senate at that time and I've talked to a number of people who were a part of that process on both sides people that were part of the Republican team that issued the veto people that were in the legislature and were Democrats who worked to override that veto and to a person they say it was one of the most unpleasant experiences in their careers as elected officials the politics weren't good for either side I don't think any Vermonters were looking at that thinking boy you know this is exactly what I was hoping for when I elected all these people into office the constitution does allow for a governor to issue a veto and gives the legislature the power to override that veto the consensus among the elected officials that I've talked to say that when that happens it really is a breakdown in the system it means that something isn't working the way it's supposed to and it's certainly not the way most people outside the Montpelier bubble want to see their state government working for them voters for the most part want their elected officials to come together make compromises figure out a way to get the work of the state done and do it as fast as possible and get out of dodge and there is some optimism right now maybe it's misplaced among a lot of people in Montpelier that this new legislative dynamic will lend itself to that outcome to people just getting together getting along better so before I wrap up here and throw it to you all for questions I want to revisit this idea that I mentioned earlier and that is how to reconcile the results of this election how to hold in one hand this idea that voters really love their Republican governor and on the other they want to put the super majority of Democrats and progressives into the state house and as it turns out the phenomenon of divided government is something that political scientists have been ruminating over for decades now and despite all the study they have done on it even they can't seem to agree on the underlying factors for what at face value seems like an irrational outcome you know from an electoral standpoint let's I think a great real life example that we can use to sort of exemplify what we're talking about is a district like North Euro voters there chose Phil Scott by a 2 to 1 margin over Christine Hallquist that was 360 people voting for Phil Scott 180 people voting for Christine Hallquist it's a massive win for Phil Scott he has a big divide there and yet those same voters voted for a Democrat for the house and it wasn't just any Democrat it was House Speaker Mitzi Johnson this is the person who probably was the most important driver behind the paid family leave legislation and was one of the critical drivers behind paid family leave so the voters in this district voted for the person that was the driving force behind the things that Phil Scott vetoed and then they also voted for the person that vetoed the things that Mitzi Johnson was trying to push through so what's going on here how do you explain this it doesn't seem like an intuitive outcome I don't think and one popular theory among political scientists is that voters are consciously choosing divided government as a way of restoring balance to their political universe this idea stems from the thinking that most voters are somewhere in the center or at least a plurality of voters consider themselves to be centrists and those voters are afraid of extremists on either side they're afraid of Republicans who are extremely conservative they're afraid of Democrats who are extremely liberal and so they the theory goes that they feel like by splitting their tickets they can check the power of both ideologies they give power over one branch to one party power over another branch to a different party and in doing so feel like they can bring government on the whole somewhere in the middle other political scientists say there's no evidence to suggest that voters are thinking about things that consciously or that deeply when they show up to the ballot box and they say you know it's really more conventional factors that explain this phenomenon factors like the power of incumbency and they would say well I can explain this outcome to you Phil Scott is a popular incumbent Mitzi Johnson is a powerful incumbent and they held those seats going into this election and so of course they hold those seats out of them that's the expected outcome we would have they also cite factors like the general quality of a candidate Phil Scott is a popular guy people like him the same can be said of Mitzi Johnson as a politician she's an effective speaker has solid rhetorical skills both of them have this kind of magnetism and charisma that people like in their politicians and there's a ton of research that does tell us people care more about a candidate's temperament and character than the specific aspects of their partisan platform that also would help explain why people are voting for Phil Scott and for Mitzi Johnson and another factor in the outcome of these races is money, money matters now maybe more than it ever has and Phil Scott had more money and a much more sprawling campaign apparatus than Christine Alquist did his own campaign raised more money than she did and he had a Republican super PAC at his back that spent more than a half million dollars on his behalf to run TV ads send postcards to voters at the local level the Vermont Democratic Party had a much bigger campaign apparatus than the Vermont GOP and they used a lot of those resources on local races for the House and Senate the Democratic Party was fascinating enough didn't spend all that much money at all on the race for governor maybe they didn't think Phil Scott could be beat who knows but they did invest very heavily in local races they sent postcards they did Facebook advertising and that could help explain as well this outcome where we have a Republican governor and Democratic House candidates both having extremely successful days on election day so the point is what's at work here but I find it a fascinating thing to think about and then the thought I'll leave you on is kind of the so what of divided government and what does it mean for what we're going to get from the government that we just elected and political scientists have also spent a lot of time thinking about this studying the effect of divided government on the legislative policy that emerges from that government and again the data are not conclusive but by and large the research does point to one thing and that is that important legislation and this can be defined as major policy reforms that are going to have immediate and concrete impacts on the lives of citizens is less likely to be passed into law under divided government than it is under a unified government and some researchers say the important legislation that does pass under a divided government is much different than it would be under a unified government one outcome of divided government is institutional conflict right the executive branch going at it with the legislative branch in a way they might not if they were being run by people from the same party and when you have institutional conflict the major legislation that does pass is part of a very long bargaining process that can really lead to the delusion of some of the key elements of the policy at hand so what does that mean for us in 2019 it means you're not going to get a new deal type legislation under divided government these grand sprawling historic and generational laws generally happen under a unified government because that's the only context in which you have the will to get them through a proposal like single payer health care for instance that peter shellman came to the table with had he had a legislature controlled by republicans we wouldn't even have been talking about it right but because he had democrats controlling both the house and senate it was a possibility now he wasn't able to realize that outcome but when you have unified government with things like that actually can happen and it means that major shifts in spending policy like phil scott's proposal of the cap education spending or to mandate reductions in school staff that also probably cannot happen under a divided government there's just not the room there for it which means we have all these major policy questions right now in vermont right whether it's how much we're going to spend on public education how we're going to pay to clean up vermont's waterways how to improve affordability for everyday vermoners and so long as we have an executive branch controlled by one party and a legislative branch controlled by another we're exceedingly unlikely to see any seismic shifts in policy to deal with these issues and for better or worse so long as we have a republican governor and a democratic legislature the evolution of policy is going to be slow and it's going to be incremental and perhaps what vermonters were saying in this election is that's exactly how they want it so thank you all for being here and I'm happy to answer any questions and if anybody has any questions about what might be other issues that might be coming up in 2019 legislative session happy to answer those as well my name is Jane Van Landingham I'm a grandmother I live in Richmond, Vermont and if you listen to me talk you'll know I'm from away I grew up in North Carolina I retired here 10 years ago and I'm very grateful to be in general warmly welcomed in Vermont I came home from the polls on election day where I'm a JP and had been working the election and still had to go back that night and count for several hours to discover that someone had removed one of the political signs from my yard I'm a Democrat my father started out as a Southern Democrat which probably won't surprise people but I have my own reasons now for being a Democrat and I had five signs on my yard when I got home four of the Democratic signs remained on my yard but someone had come onto my property and removed my Christine for Governor's sign I would like to think that the wind blew it over but I went and looked in the gutters and in the ditch and it wasn't there in general and I happen to be a gay person I feel loved and welcomed by my neighbors and so forth and I don't think it was one of my next door or nearby neighbors who stole that sign but I wish you would comment a little bit about the effect of having someone who is most people will say now that they know a gay person but most people don't know a trans person or they don't know if they do and I wonder if you would comment on the effect of that whole issue on the Governor's race and I'm mad about my sign if it makes you feel any better the practice of stealing political signs I believe is old as politics itself so you weren't the first and you won't be the last which isn't to say that it's an excusable offense right I spend a lot of time thinking about what impact Christine Hawquist's gender identity had on the way the electorate perceived her as a candidate had on to consider voting for her and I live in Worcester, Vermont and it's a pretty rural place and it's got a lot of old boy Vermonters in it people that have been there whose families have been there for generations and there are a lot of salty Republicans who I kind of get they're sort of the I use them as my finger on the pulse of the conservative Republican community and it was disheartening for me when I would get coffee there in the morning sometimes to listen to the way they would talk about Christine Hawquist and it was illuminating for me as well because sometimes we find ourselves in our little social bubbles that we think are a microcosm of the world we live in and then when you get outside of them you realize that that's not the case at all there's no question in my mind that there were people who might have otherwise considered Christine Hawquist in their voting decision who wrote her off before they even got to that consideration point because she was a transgender woman I was shadowing her for a day when she was on the campaign trail and that included a stop at a parade where Christine was running through the streets and there were people that turned their backs on her now whether or not that was the decisive factor I don't think we can say that she was facing a lot of other hurdles she was not a perfect candidate first time candidate I think it showed in some ways in terms of her rhetorical presentation her ability to connect with people on that level but I think it had an effect she necessarily would have won had she not been a transgender woman but I think it was there were some people that speculated that was an advantage for her because it gave her so much attention I don't think that's necessarily the case for each of the two legislative sessions that Phil Scott has served so far he has sprung a pretty significant piece of proposed legislation on the legislature late in the session and I really can't figure out why he would do that he was a legislator himself and I think he would have been upset had a prior governor done that to him and to other legislators so I want to get your thoughts on why he's done that in the past two sessions and whether you think he might do that again much as I wish I could I'm unable to get inside the head of Phil Scott and his political advisors but here's one thought I've had on that you want to as a politician create an environment in which the things you want to happen are most likely to thrive and I think that one of the calculations was that legislative chaos might be a pretty useful environment for moving things forward that we want to see happen now was there any part of Phil Scott that thought legislators will go right along with this idea to cap school budgets I don't think there was was there any part of Phil Scott that thought legislators are going to go along with mandatory reductions to school staff I don't think there was but I think that the thinking was in shooting for the stars maybe we'll end up landing on the moon which is a lot further than we are right now and I don't think that it worked to their benefit I mean I think that there's a scenario where Democratic lawmakers are under extraordinary pressure on the issue of property taxes themselves they would love to find a way to deal with that issue in a productive way but Phil Scott has not sort of built up the will with legislators sort of you know off the record behind the scenes conversations well before the session starts to kind of grease the wheels for something everybody can agree on that's not the approach they've chosen and so I think they just really thought they could will their way to this happening by throwing out these these giant ideas and maybe getting halfway there and thinking that would be better than nothing at all so that's the question is, is he chastened or not has he seen the you know, recognized what Democrats think or the error of his ways and will he change his approach in 2019 and I think we'll get a really good sense of whether or not he's going to in the next few weeks here can you say a little bit about climate change and the possible legislation I was invited yesterday to an off the record conversation with some advocates of the Vermont Natural Resources Council I wasn't able to make it but I know that they're working on some climate legislation I imagine it will be something approximating the Essex plan I don't know if you're familiar with that but it was a version of a carbon pollution tax where you would raise taxes on carbon emitting fuels like diesel, unleaded, heating oil but then you would figure out some way to return to low and middle income Vermonters via some dividend or something the extra money that they would be spending on these fossil fuels and I know that those advocates are incredibly happy with what happened on Tuesday would they have liked to see Christine Hallquist win? Of course they would but the Vermont Conservation Voters Action Fund which is a super pack a local super pack, a Vermont grown super pack it's all in state money raised $120,000 this cycle I don't think they spent a dollar on Christine Hallquist maybe they spent a few dollars on her but not much, where did they put that money? for the House and Senate key races where they had candidates that they thought would be supportive of something like a carbon pollution tax and it's my sense that Democrats for whom climate change is a singular issue are starting to reach the critical mass of numbers that they need in the State House to really begin moving those concepts beyond the midi level which is where they've been stuck at to date leadership is very scared of the idea of a carbon tax they don't think it plays well in the campaign trail but I think pressure is building in the ranks to really have a more meaningful debate in the State House about the carbon tax issue and it's possible that we could see that begin to happen in 2019 I don't think they're going to be passing it but I think a lot of these advocates have their eye on the long horizon and see this as more of a 5-10 year fight than a 1-2 year fight this is probably a pathetically naive question but do you envision any way in which we might ultimately switch school funding from property based to income based I had a conversation with Phil Scott not too long ago where he signaled a real willingness to that concept he said in Democrats for the most part are already there I think it's a concept that's really taken hold in the Democratic mainstream here are the caveats that Phil Scott puts on that the burden can't be too overwhelming on really wealthy people and it needs to be coupled with a real and meaningful plan to reduce the rate of growth in education spending given the governor's approach to education spending issues over the past two years and given the chasm between that approach and what Democrats would like to see it would be a really it would be quite a change of events to see them somehow coming together to push forward a major education formula education funding formula reform keep in mind it's been 20 years since the education funding formula we had was put in place and generally these things take years to come up with in terms of getting the willpower and buy in for a replacement so I think it's a possibility I don't think it's a likelihood I think it's inevitable that we're moving in that direction the question is what will it look like and how long will it take to get there healthcare on the national level seems to be a big issue this year but it's very quiet in Vermont is the comment on that yes and I just heard one request to repeat the question so I will the question was healthcare seems to have been a big issue at the national level during this election cycle but seems to be a little bit quieter not as controversial in Vermont and I think the reason that that's the case is because when it comes to healthcare democrats and republicans are pretty much on the same page right now in Vermont you'll recall the downfall of Peter Shumlin single payer healthcare plan what that merged into though was this concept of accountable care organizations and a Medicaid expansion where we were taking advantage of the Affordable Care Act to bring all this new federal money into the state of Vermont to be able to pay for healthcare for lower income residents and when Phil Scott inherited state government from Peter Shumlin there was a lot of speculation around what he would do in terms of the path that Vermont is on for healthcare reform Phil Scott had had some pretty critical things to say about what Peter Shumlin had done before he became governor once he was governor though and had an opportunity to get briefed on everything that was going on at the agency of human services and everything that was going on in the healthcare system Phil Scott said you know what this actually looks like a pretty good idea you've got going here the problem with healthcare is that the amount of money that you're talking about means that we are so constrictively tied to what happens at the federal level that it really is difficult to change things substantially by using the relatively small levers that you have in state government to control healthcare costs so I think this payment reform path that we're on right now where the idea is to reward providers for the quality of care that they're giving as opposed to the number of procedures they happen to perform I think by and large most everybody in Montpelier is in agreement that that's the way we ought to move forward and I don't see any major shifts in that path over the next two years for sure I mean to dominate but I have another good question I bet it is good it's also a theory we talked about the 2-1 margin in North Hero for Phil Scott and then those voters turned right around and supported the current speaker and I could see the writing on the wall in terms of Hallquist not being elected governor the polls seem to indicate that she was not that strong a candidate and I also appreciated the fact that Phil Scott reversed his position on gun safety and supported three different pieces of important legislation and I wanted to reward him for that and I wanted to kind of send a message to the NRA and the state franchise of the NRA to say that I support the governor that will do the right thing as far as gun safety goes and I'm thinking that that may have been what we were to some extent in North Hero as well yeah I think you're right and just kind of riffing on this idea of what was you know we were all speculating what is the impact of Phil Scott's evolving stance on gun laws going to mean for him at the ballot box and I think most people at this point have come to the conclusion that it was a net positive for him that he was able to endear himself to Democrats through those bypassing those bills into law in a way that wanted more votes from the left than he lost on the right I think another noteworthy dynamic in Vermont over the past two years that may have had the same effect for Phil Scott is the words that he has had for Donald Trump and some of the positions that he's taken at the state level specific actionable legislation that cast him as part of the resistance against President Donald Trump whether that was on immigration policy where Phil Scott came out in a press conference shortly after Donald Trump issued an executive order saying he wanted to enlist state and federal law enforcement agencies in enforcing federal immigration law Phil Scott said no we're not going to do that in Vermont or in other areas where Phil Scott has really gone out of his way to criticize and chastise Donald Trump I think I think Rich Clark he's a professor of political science at Castleton University put it best when he said to me Democrats choose as a hero those who those Republicans who resist Donald Trump and I think there's something to that and I think it had an effect in our VPR Vermont PBS poll Phil Scott won 26% of Democrats 26% it's a big number and I think that the gun issue and Donald Trump issue might have played into that Did the NRA support Phil Scott as much as they had before? You know interestingly the NRA has not invested a lot of money in Vermont elections almost ever they would give a few hundred dollars here and there to some candidates but have not tried to exert influence by virtue of money in politics they used other strategies though so thank you one more okay sorry for the late handrails I wonder how votes are counted so we still hear Georgia and Florida are counting their absentee ballots but 40% of Vermont voted pre-election day is there a great reg about how they get counted and when? You know it's funny I was listening to an interview on the way here where on NPR where they were talking to a Tampa Bay Times reporter in Florida and this guy is covering this right now and Phil Rick Scott has filed some kind of lawsuit against Broward County elections officials because they haven't delivered their vote totals yet and they were naturally put the question to this reporter that's covering it there on the ground why is it taking so long for them to count the votes and he said we keep we don't know we've been trying to get the answer to that and we can't seem to figure it out there you go so you know the complexities of the vote counting process seems to differ from precinct to precinct it's really confusing as to why some come up with the counts sooner than others Thank you so very much Thank you all so much great to be here