Who Will Be Vermont's Next Lieutenant Governor?

Will voters, or a progressive legislature, decide?

Vermont’s election season may not be over. Because John Rodgers unseated incumbent Lieutenant Governor Dave Zuckerman with less than 50% of the popular vote, the Vermont Legislature will determine which of the two candidates will become the next Vermont LG. It is worthwhile to consider what the implications are if the state’s progressive majority in the legislature uses this opportunity to wage a coup against walkaway Rodgers to reinstall the dethroned Zuckerman.

(John Klar, Joel Salatin, and John Rodgers celebrating food and farming together.)

The Vermont Constitution permits the Legislature to install any of the top three LG candidates – Zuckerman, Rodgers, or Ian Diamondstone of the Green Mountain Peace & Justice Party. Because I have zero trust in Vermont’s progressive bullying machine, it is important that Vermonters contemplate the potential implications of a resurrection of Zuckerman over Rodgers after the voters have clearly spoken.

As progressive propaganda outlet VTdigger reported:

In a press release Wednesday night, Diamondstone and the Green Mountain Peace & Justice Party said the Legislature should elect Zuckerman, arguing that (if one ignores those who left the ballot line blank) a majority of voters selected one of the two liberal candidates, Zuckerman or Diamondstone.

Even as he told the radio hosts he’d conceded, Zuckerman expressed agreement with that argument.

“I did hear that late yesterday the folks from the Peace & Justice Party put out a press release saying, ‘Hey, we think our votes should be counted towards David and he should win,’” Zuckerman said. “I really appreciated that they did that. I think that’s a fair statement.”

I’m not sure that it is such a “fair statement” to say that Diamondstone’s votes should be credited to Dave Z – that is ranked-choice voting, which is very different from the Vermont Constitutional provision and which raises a hornet’s nest of potential problems.

For one thing, Ian Diamondstone wants to have his saboteur’s cake and eat it, too. His narcissistic run may well have cost Dave Zuckerman the win – if Ian didn’t want to help John Rodgers win, why did he run? Now that he screwed the progressive pooch, he wants a whiney do-over. Sorry, Charlie – you don’t get it both ways!

Let us consider what the implications are if Ian Diamondstone, who garnered a paltry 13,657 votes, is essentially allowed the power to select the next Vermont LG by allocating “his” votes to Dave over John.

The assumption is that the Peace & Justice Party is automatically in the Progressive Zuck column. Some leftwing voters may have voted for Diamondstone as a protest against Dave: they, too, made their choices. Yet, what if the party at issue is not so clearly aligned with one of the two top options? What if an independent candidate or non-traditional party candidate touts a policy blend that defies easy categorization? Will the legislature and candidates quarrel over who gets the spoils?

The fact is, votes are not proprietary assets like phone numbers or email addresses – they are not a political currency to be used like an intangible graft. No one voted for Diamondstone in order to give him their franchise as a political asset to transfer like some novel fiat currency. That in itself should be a stall to ranked-choice voting and the suggestion that crediting votes to Zuckerman is a “fair question.”

To better see the potential pitfalls of setting a legislative precedent by installing Zuckerman over Rodgers, let us reflect upon Vermont’s 2014 election for Governor, in which Peter Shumlin defeated Scott Milne by a scant 2,574 votes. Had ranked-choice voting been employed, there is no doubt Dan Feliciano’s 8,428 votes would be slotted in the Milne column – Dan ran as a libertarian, but there is no question he was and is a conservative. Yet not all of Dan’s voters may have preferred Milne – they chose Dan. Dan spoiled Milne’s run the way Diamondstone undermined Dave’s – it’s a free country, and anyone can run. “Them’s the breaks.”

But wait. The 2014 gubernatorial race also included Emily Peyton and the Liberty Union Party (3,157 votes) and Independents Pete Diamondstone (1,673 votes), Bernard Peters (1.434 votes), and Cris Ericson (1,089 votes). Presumably, Pete Diamondstone and Cris Erickson were progressives. Bernard Peters is a conservative. Emily Peyton is not so easily categorized. How would the legislature employ ranked choice voting to allocate these votes without greatly undermining the wishes of numerous voters and attracting more cynicism and distrust of Vermont’s electoral system?

For instance, if Emily Peyton was granted the “liberty” to allocate her Liberty Union Party votes to either Shumlin or Milne, she would have enormous power and would single-handedly determine the election outcome. The tail would have wagged the dog – Emily is a very nice person, but was not awarded votes so that she could use them to politically barter Vermont’s gubernatorial outcome.

Nice-sounding ideas often require critical analysis to perceive hidden threats. Ranked-choice voting creates confusion, shifts attention away from policies in favor of personalities, and risks undermining voter confidence by allowing unconscionable outcomes.

This is where Vermont’s legislature finds itself in 2025 – if it installs Dave Zuckerman over John Rodgers by crediting Diamondstone’s request to “transfer” his votes to Dave, there will be political Hell to pay, and rightly so. Vermonters who voted for John Rodgers will feel disenfranchised – because they would be! And progressives chortling over their “success” would have ushered in a new election complication that they wouldn’t like so much if committed by the opposition.

Such “one rule for thee, but not for me” hypocrisy by Vermont’s progressive supermajority has become par for the tiresome course in the Green Mountains. This partly explains why the vote shifted red in 2024. A Zuckerman coup might win a short-term partisan battle, but it would seed destruction for progressives in the broader ideological war as Vermonters watch them employ any means to pursue power rabidly.

That’s not what citizens voted for. The only legitimate option is to install John Rodgers as the rightful winner of the office of Vermont Lieutenant Governor. If progressives don’t like that fulfillment of common sense and the Rule of Law, they should take their complaints to Ian Diamondstone, and plan better in the future.