In Orange County Senate race, Vermont GOP tries again to unseat Mark MacDonald  – VTDigger

ORANGE COUNTY — Prominently displayed on the campaign website for Larry Hart, an Orange County Republican candidate for Vermont Senate, is an endorsement from an unnamed community member: “nice guy, reasonable and calm.”

It’s a distillation of the image that Hart, a salesman at a building supply store and former Topsham selectboard member, is seeking to project to voters in his bid to unseat the longtime incumbent Democratic Senator, Mark MacDonald.

“I don’t get angry. I like to help other people,” Hart, 60, said when asked about that slogan in an interview. “You try to find the good in everybody, even if somebody might be treating you bad at that moment.”

Meanwhile, MacDonald, 81, who has served in the Legislature for a combined total of roughly 35 years, is counting on his constituents’ familiarity with him and a rigorous door-knocking regimen to return him to office.

“I was in Corinth again yesterday — 86 doors,” MacDonald said in a phone interview Tuesday. It’s not an all-time best, he admitted: “I don’t get in and out of the car as fast as I used to.”

MacDonald has represented the Senate district for a total of 23 years, from 1996 to 1998 and then again from 2003 through today. 

But Republicans have long eyed the seat, which represents about 22,000 people in 13 towns, including Randolph, Williamstown, Bradford and Tunbridge. It’s one of five Senate districts that the Vermont GOP is targeting in an effort to topple the Democratic supermajority in the statehouse.

Now, buoyed by an endorsement from Gov. Phil Scott and a surge of campaign contributions — largely from Chittenden County donors — Hart hopes that voter frustration over tax and cost-of-living increases will be enough to finally flip the seat. 

Achieving affordability

The two candidates agree on the primary issue animating the campaign and others around the state: Vermont’s high cost of living, particularly the dearth of affordable housing in the state. 

MacDonald has floated the idea of raising taxes on second and third homes owned by part-time residents to fund affordable housing. 

“A lot of people go to Florida,” he said. “They go, you know, six months and a day, and they come back and don’t pay any income taxes in (Vermont).” 

Hart, meanwhile, declined to provide specific legislative proposals to address affordability, saying only that policies would need to be hashed out through collaboration with other lawmakers and the executive branch. 

“We need the Governor’s team involved in it,” he said. “We need us involved in it. We need some people in the House that have common sense.”

Republicans have pointed to legislation supported by MacDonald that they argue is making Vermont less affordable, like this year’s yield bill, which set out an average 13.8% increase in property taxes to fund school budgets for the next fiscal year, and the clean heat standard, which, if implemented, would require fossil fuel importers to offset their products’ emissions. 

Hart has also said he would like to see tougher penalties for petty crimes and to bolster Vermont’s substance use recovery system — a goal motivated by his daughter’s death of a fentanyl overdose. He’s also expressed opposition to an overdose prevention center, also known as a safe injection site, in the state, something MacDonald voted for in the most recent legislative session.

And although his campaign has taken some jabs at MacDonald, Hart has professed a commitment to running a polite race. 

“I’m not going to slam Mark. I’m not going to do that. That’s not who I am,” he said. 

‘Longtime ties’

“This is a seat that we’ve been focused on for a while,” Paul Dame, the chair of the Vermont Republican Party, said in an interview. “We think this is going to be a pretty competitive race this year.”

Hart is a departure from the last Republican to challenge MacDonald: John Klar, a firebrand writer and farmer who leaned into culture war issues in his 2022 campaign. MacDonald won that race with a ten-point margin of victory, even after he was sidelined by a stroke just weeks before the election. 

Dame said that Hart, who owned auto parts stores in Randolph and Bradford and spent nine years on the Topsham selectboard, was recruited in large part because of his longtime ties to the area. 

“In the past, sometimes we’ve had people who tend to be more ideological,” Dame said. “They get involved, and they have a very narrow sample of what quote-unquote Vermonters think. And then they go out and campaign and realize that they don’t really know the district that well.”

Asked if he was referring to Klar, Dame said, “Nobody specifically.”

MacDonald, meanwhile, charged that Hart, despite his moderate image, “holds pretty much the same views as my opponent a few years ago, but he doesn’t go around and broadcast it.”

MacDonald’s pitch is that, effectively, his outreach to and familiarity with constituents gives him an intimate understanding of their concerns. 

“Folks who I interrupted (their) dinner, or when they’re picking potatoes, or combing out the dog hair on the front porch, or having a beer in the door yard, leaning against the back of the truck on a Saturday afternoon,” MacDonald said. “That’s how you see people where they are, and hear what they’re thinking.”

Until Election Day, of course, it’s also impossible to say how much frustration over property taxes will translate into votes in the district.

But homestead tax rates in the Senate District are not going up as quickly as in other parts of the state — or at all, according to preliminary data compiled by Vermont Public in August. 

Between the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years, Tunbridge and Strafford are projected to see homestead tax hikes of 11.2% and 9.7% respectively, the largest in the district. But in other towns — Topsham, Vershire, Corinth, Fairlee and West Fairlee — tax rates are actually dropping. Fairlee and West Fairlee will see the district’s largest decreases, of roughly 20%, among the largest drops in the state, according to the data. 

That’s in part due to recent reforms intended to direct more school funding money towards districts that need it more — such as rural and low-income parts of the state.

‘Good discussions’

MacDonald, in an interview, pointed out that Hart’s campaign has been funded almost entirely by donors outside Orange County. 

According to an October campaign finance filing, Hart has raised roughly $25,000, the vast majority of which has come in increments of $1,000 or $960 from addresses in Chittenden County: Burlington, Shelburne, South Burlington. Most of that money has gone into postcards and advertisements online, in newspapers and on the radio.

Hart attributed those donations to frustrations over liberal Chittenden County representatives in the Statehouse and what donors see as the impact of their policies on Burlington: drug use, violence, homelessness. 

“They’re like, this isn’t the Burlington we knew,” Hart said. “And so they’re frustrated with that.”

According to his most recent report, MacDonald has raised a fraction of that haul, with only about $3,300 in contributions. 

But Jim Dandeneau, the executive of the Vermont Democratic Party, said that the party is optimistic that MacDonald’s “tireless” campaigning and years representing the district will pay dividends on election day.

“Mark has deep relationships in the community,” Dandeneau said in a brief interview. “Mark has people who are very loyal to him because he’s done a lot to help them.”

On Tuesday, MacDonald estimated that he has so far visited around 2,300 houses during the campaign. 

“I got to go and pay for a radio ad today,” he said in an early morning interview. “And at 10 o’clock I’ll be knocking on doors.”