Looking for Mr. (Ms?) Right

Although becoming an official vote-counter has meant leaving behind my career of promoting, disparaging and actively trying to impact the fortunes of candidates, I remain an avid student of the game, so to speak. As such I am left scratching my head about the recently-passed primary election - specifically the GOP gubernatorial primary - and asking one question:

What the hell?

It's, of course, the write-in campaign of Libertarian Dan Feliciano that I'm WTHing about. Or perhaps more accurately, the write-in campaign against Scott Milne that happened to use Dan Feliciano's identity. Or no, more accurately still - the write-in-campaign against Phil Scott and David Sunderland that, rather than take on Phil Scott directly, co-opted Dan Feliciano and the Libertarian crowd in some sort of flanking maneuver.

There. Got all that?

Now, none of this is to question the sincerity of Feliciano and the Libertarians. This was win-win for them. But they have to know they were used as the latest pawns in the post-Douglas balkanization of the statewide GOP that many of us assumed was over. Apparently, not so much.

It's not worth rehashing the power struggles between the more moderate "Phil Scott" wing of the state Republican Party, and the more conservative (or maybe more precisely, the "more combative") wing - which I suppose can now be referred to as the Darcie Johnston wing, given her persistence as a force in the struggle - going so far as to publicly initiate the Feliciano write-in effort.

It is worth wondering what, exactly, was the end game supposed to be, here? Electoral politics are all about lining up all the variables and staying in control of as many as possible, all the time. That's organizng 101. The Johnston-motivated Feliciano effort was never in control of anything at all. What's even stranger, then, was to see it joined by (presumably) wiser conservative voices such as Brady Toensing and John McLaughry.

Now it is important to remember that, in electoral politics, its not always necessary to win. Often, a good solid place - or even show - can send the message you want to send. A solid second place showing from a conservative-backed candidate could've had that effect here - but that's not what happened.

And let's be clear: that was never going to happen. This was as big - and as weird - of a political Hail Mary as I've ever seen. Given the timing, the level of organization, the extra-partisan nature of the candidate, the fact that it was a write-in effort, the fact that it was a primary... there was only one way this was going to go. And now consider the effect.

• After relatively narrow losses within the party infrastructure, the Johnston wing just got itself crushed quite publicly.
• Phil Scott - who was the real target of the Johnston-wing - can now say he is such a juggernaut that ehis enemies felt that a weird write-in campaign like this one was a better bet to politically harm him than trying to take him on directly. Talk about empowering your enemy.
• By reaching outside the party, the Johnston wing has potentially alienated itself from GOP rank and file.
• Any ability to say "I told you so" if Shumlin badly beats Milne in the General has been wiped out with an easy "look who's talking" smirk.

I just don't get it. What was the endgame? What was the point?

If nothing else, it shows that the vacuum created by the retirement of Jim Douglas is still very much the operative dynamic. One might have thought that a return of Douglas might be the only thing to remedy the situation, but Douglas's endorsement of Milne probably refutes that once and for all. For all the damage that Mr. Douglas may have done to down-ticket party organization by so exclusively tasking the State Committee resources to his own electoral interests, the fact remains that the guy was a political Marshall Tito that somehow - beyond anyone's real understanding - was able to keep Vermont republicans from going to war with themselves from cycle to cycle.

It could be that things don't get better for the GOP until a new Douglas comes along. Hard to really know if that's true when you don't really know how Douglas pulled that off in the first place.

What's more likely is that, not entirely unlike the Vermont Democrats in the 90s, the simmering feuds and conflicts that boiled over just need more than just an election cycle or two to burn themselves out. We shall see.

John Odum