With incumbent Republican Vermont Governor Phil Scott down 38 percent in the polls this year, challenger Hallquist Christine believes she’s got a good chance taking his seat in this fall’s midterm elections, if she wins next Tuesday’s Democratic primary on August 14.
And becoming the first transgender governor in Vermont … and in the United States.
“It’s clear it’s for us to lose, which I won’t, ’cause I’m disciplined,” Hallquist told a prospective contributor to her campaign, as reported in an Aug. 7 Politico profile.
As Hallquist told Boston Spirit magazine earlier this year in our “Let Us Introduce You” profile on her (May/June 2018 issue), she’s running on experience, not identity. She brings top management skills from her 12-year role as CEO of Vermont Electric Coop, during which she completely turned around the ailing organization’s finances. She hopes to bring that expertise to combat climate change, fight rural poverty, protect LGBT rights and much more if she gets the chance to take the office.
According to Politico:
In large parts of the country, the appearance of a viable statewide transgender candidate would have caused a political earthquake, but here, her transgender status has been largely an afterthought.
“It will be irrelevant in Vermont,” former Gov. Howard Dean, who recently offered Hallquist campaign advice over breakfast, told POLITICO.
Rather than making her gender identity a focus of her campaign, she is running, essentially, as a wonky technocrat. Her signature issue is a plan to revitalize rural Vermont by laying high-speed, fiber optic cable statewide. It’s a platform that plays to her record turning around the fortunes of the electric utility she ran until early this year.
That her transgender status has been relegated to a non-issue — in fact, she’s starting to wield it as an asset — is in part, a testament to the state’s longstanding progressive culture. Vermont was the first state to abolish slavery, the first to grant same-sex couples civil unions with full marriage rights, and the first to legalize same-sex marriage through its legislature, rather than by court ruling.
It is also a sign of the arrival of transgender Americans as a small but burgeoning political force.
