Three days after the Vermont primary elections, there’s one nail-biter of a race still in contention.
Could Annette Smith — a write-in candidate for governor on the Progressive Party ticket — unseat party chair Martha Abbott as the party’s pick for opposing Peter Shumlin?
Smith’s supporters won’t officially know until next week how their upstart, seat-of-the-pants write-in campaign panned out. The Secretary of State’s unofficial tally shows Abbott leading over write-in votes (not all of which may be for Smith) 304-248. With only 77 percent of precincts reporting, Smith supporter Stephanie Kaplan thinks the race could be much closer. She put in a call to Craftsbury, where Smith’s fierce opposition of the Lowell wind project has won over some fans, and learned that 33 voters chose a write-in candidate on the Prog ticket. Newark counts another eight.
In other words, it’s a tight race — which is a surprising turn of events in a contest announced just two weeks before the primary, and particularly one in which the candidate herself has refused to campaign, make speeches, or even engage with reporters beyond the reminder (as she told this Seven Dayzer on August 14) that she’d be happy to talk about her advocacy work but not her election.
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