Lt. Gov. John Rodgers emerged from a campaign-trail meet and greet at the Manchester Community Library last week and braced himself for a long drive home. It was 7:30 p.m., and Rodgers, who had started his day 14 hours earlier with chores on his cannabis farm in Glover, faced three hours on the road before his head would hit a pillow.
When a reporter asked how the first-term Republican felt about being behind in the polls, Rodgers went on the attack against his Democratic opponent, Molly Gray — a strategy he recently embraced.
“They’re going to outraise me and outspend me, but they’re not going to outwork me,” Rodgers said. “I worked my ass off for two years in this job. She did nothing but run for Congress.”
Responding to such criticism, Gray said she’s been traveling the state trying to find solutions to the problems Vermonters face and was disappointed Rodgers wasn’t doing the same. “John’s last-ditch, negative, personal attacks are a disservice to Vermonters and the civil, issue-focused debate they deserve,” she said in a written statement.
I worked my ass off for two years in this job. She did nothing but run for Congress.
Lt. Gov. John Rodgers
The race for lieutenant governor started as a fairly tame affair after Gray, a human rights lawyer who served in the role from 2021 to 2023, won the August 11 Democratic primary by a wide margin. She focused her campaign on reducing health care costs, expanding housing options and pushing back against the Trump administration’s attacks on migrants.
Meanwhile Rodgers, a cannabis farmer and stonemason, largely ignored Gray as he crisscrossed the state visiting county fairs, eating creemees, touting his blue-collar roots and bemoaning the erosion of rural property rights.
But in recent weeks, Rodgers has pointedly attacked Gray for her policy positions, rural credentials and past political aspirations.
On Tuesday, Rodgers launched his latest salvo, releasing documents related to worker living conditions on her family’s Newbury farm to suggest Gray might not care as much about migrants as she claims.
Citing federal and state inspection records from 2024 and 2025, Rodgers’ campaign shared photographs of Four Corners Farm, where Gray grew up and her family members still live.
The images showed what the campaign said were housing violations in a converted barn on the property, including walls without insulation, use of space heaters and livestock living beneath a cooking area. The farm resolved the violations and paid a $1,728 fine in early 2025.
“My opponent has made dignity, humane treatment and meeting immigrants’ basic needs a centerpiece of her campaign, but these records raise legitimate questions about whether those same standards were being met for migrant workers at the family farm she regularly touts as part of her own story,” Rodgers said in a statement.
In a statement of her own, Gray noted that she neither lives on the farm nor is involved in the operations and blasted Rodgers for dragging her family into the campaign.
“Our family farms are what make Vermont special and for John Rodgers to attack them shows more about him than anyone else,” Gray said. “John Rodgers has every right to come after me and my policy ideas, but going after my family is disgraceful and a new low.”
Gray said her family members care deeply about their workers and have worked hard to bring the housing on the farm into compliance, and she urged Rodgers to join her in running a “positive, issue-focused campaign.”
But the shift in tone suggests that Rodgers is worried his tenure as lieutenant governor could be a short one.
Democrats have identified Rodgers’ seat as one they can flip, and recent surveys suggest he may be vulnerable.
Late last month, the Green Mountain State Poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center showed Gray leading Rodgers by 19 points. Just a few days later, a Vermont Public poll showed her up by 8. Rodgers has questioned the accuracy of the polls and expressed confidence he will prevail.
“We were down in the polls two years ago, and we won,” Rodgers said, referring to his narrow victory over former lieutenant governor David Zuckerman. “The momentum is on my side. The issues are on my side. We’re just going to keep pushing through until Election Day, and we still have confidence we’ll come out on top, just like last time.”
Rodgers, who did not face a primary challenger, is behind Gray in overall fundraising. Gray has pulled in $521,000 and had $141,000 in cash on hand according to an October 1 filing. Rodgers has raised $293,000 and had $84,000 on hand with just over a month to go. He out-raised Gray during the most recent reporting period, however, bringing in $150,200 to her $95,400.
Rodgers’ critique of Gray for running for Congress while serving as lieutenant governor is not new. In late 2021, less than a year into her two-year term, Gray announced she would seek Vermont’s lone U.S. House seat. She immediately faced criticism for her quick pivot to higher office and lost the primary to then-state senator Becca Balint.
“When Vermonters elect you to office, I believe you owe it to them to do that job,” Rodgers said during a Town Meeting TV forum the day after his appearance in Manchester. “I’m doing the job. My opponent did not. She used the office to run for Congress, and now she wants the job back.”
Gray did not respond during the forum but issued a statement later.
“I served every single day of my term in the Lt. Governor’s office. I may have not run for reelection, but I didn’t step back or give up,” Gray wrote.
She noted that after leaving office in 2022, she went to work as executive director of the Vermont Afghan Alliance, a Burlington nonprofit organization that supports Afghan refugees resettling in the state.
Democratic leaders say they are not surprised by Rodgers’ tactics. May Hanlon, executive director of the Vermont Democratic Party, said it was pretty clear what was at play.
“John Rodgers is talking about Molly Gray because he can’t win on the issues,” Hanlon wrote in a statement. “Rodgers’ attacks on Gray aren’t a plan for Vermont. It’s a sign he doesn’t have one.”
John Rodgers is talking about Molly Gray because he can’t win on the issues.
may Hanlon
Gray’s deputy campaign manager, Erin Tevnan, said Rodgers’ critiques fit a pugilistic pattern.
“John’s increasingly personal attacks on Molly Gray are in line with his time as Lt. Governor,” she wrote in an email. “Rather than putting forward a positive vision to meet the needs of Vermonters, he has bullied and sued his town, demonstrated that the rules don’t apply to him, and failed to follow the laws he helped create.”
She was referring to two well-publicized controversies involving Rodgers. The first was his long-standing dispute with the Town of Glover over the ownership and maintenance of the road that runs through his farm. Rodgers last year sued the town to have a three-quarter-mile section of the road declared private.
The second controversy was his failure to secure an appropriate cannabis-growing license for a property where he raised hundreds of seedlings near his permitted cannabis operation. Rodgers has agreed to pay a $2,500 fine by March.
A potentially more potent line of attack against Gray has involved her position on Vermont’s struggling dairy industry. Rodgers has sought to undermine her credibility on state agricultural policy by highlighting part of an interview she gave last month during a visit to the Rural Vermont Rising booth at the Tunbridge World’s Fair. In discussing the dairy industry’s bleak economic picture, Gray noted that another 50 Vermont dairy farms are expected to stop milking cows by the end of this year.
“It may not be, unfortunately, viable to have big dairy in Vermont anymore,” Gray said. “It breaks my heart, but it may be the reality.”
Rodgers’ campaign pounced, defending an industry that still has a $5.4 billion economic footprint and uses 52 percent of the farmland in Vermont. It blasted Gray as failing to fight for dairy farmers and instead “accepting their decline.”
Lawmakers and bureaucrats weigh farmers down with endless regulations, Rodgers asserted.
“The answer isn’t to throw up our hands and declare dairy no longer viable. The answer is to change what Montpelier is doing to our farmers,” his campaign said. “Our farmers have adapted, invested, innovated and done what Montpelier has asked of them. They don’t need politicians like Molly Gray writing their obituary.”
The Vermont Dairy Producers Alliance piled on, saying Gray, who grew up on a dairy and vegetable farm in Newbury, “simply does not understand the economics of farming.”
Three days after the fair, as the online criticism was swelling, Gray’s camp, in damage-control mode, announced a new initiative called “From the Backroads: Conversations on Working Lands, Land Use and Vermont’s Future.”
Her first stops were at two farms in Fairfield, in the heart of Franklin County dairy country.
At Heart & Soil flower farm, Gray said she is a committed supporter of dairies large and small, conventional and organic, and that her remarks in Tunbridge had been taken out of context. She said it was unfortunate Rodgers didn’t seem interested in a productive discussion about the issues facing farmers and opted instead for cheap political shots.
“The disservice that John Rodgers is doing right now to what should be a serious, urgent and thoughtful conversation is, frankly, irresponsible; and it’s really harmful; and it’s politicizing the dairy community,” she said.
Financially stressed dairy farmers, she said, often face three choices: get bigger, diversify or close. The loss of dairy processing capacity in Vermont is putting additional pressure on dairies as transportation costs increase, she noted.
The state needs to figure out how to subsidize farmers’ hauling costs, Gray said, noting that the same soaring diesel prices that forced her to pay $90 to fill up her Volkswagen were hitting farmers across their operations.
Vermont could find ways to help farmers modernize their operations and to keep processing plants open, which she said she’d support as lieutenant governor. (Rodgers has also called for greater state subsidies for the industry, such as tax breaks for equipment purchases.)
Gray later toured the Magnan Brothers dairy in Fairfield, which has some of the most technologically advanced automatic milking systems in the state.
Online commenters nevertheless continued to seize on a video clip from the fair as evidence that Gray seemed to accept dairy’s demise. That annoyed Sarah Gramling, a Springfield woman who is part of the group Rural Vermont Rising. She said the clip distorts Gray’s position.
“We are becoming a sound-bite society,” Gramling said.
She posted a longer transcript of Gray’s remarks on Rural Vermont Rising’s Facebook page.
“My takeaway is, [Rodgers] is playing politics and just wants to maintain his office by misrepresenting the facts,” she said.
Rodgers denied that his campaign took Gray’s remarks out of context.
He noted that while both candidates grew up on dairy farms, he better understands the needs of rural Vermonters and will fight for them in ways Gray’s remark suggests she will not.
“I know the land. I know dairy. I know logging. I know soil. So, she’s like an observer. I’m a farmer,” Rodgers told Seven Days. “That’s the difference.”
On social media, Rodgers has leaned into his persona as a farmer, though these days he highlights the benefits of healthy soil and pollinators more than his cash crops of cannabis and hemp.
“One candidate can put on their ironed flannel, leave their Burlington home and visit a farm,” Rodgers’ son Johnny wrote on Facebook. “One candidate rolls out of bed in their flannel, already on the farm. They aren’t the same.”
The two candidates differ on several issues. Gray has strongly supported Proposal 3, which would enshrine workers’ right to organize in the state constitution. Rodgers has said the amendment is unnecessary.
The two are also at odds over renewable energy policy. Gray supports helping people transition from fossil fuels, such as by installing solar panels and batteries and buying EVs. Rodgers says he supports renewable energy but thinks the subsidies have driven up the cost of power for everyone else.
Rodgers has further suggested Gray’s positions shift with the political winds.
On WVMT radio’s “The Morning Drive,” host Kurt Wright asked Gray about a survey she took earlier this year that revealed her support for the platform of the Green Mountain Democratic Socialists of America.
During the Democratic primary, Gray agreed with all 10 of the group’s left-leaning policy positions, which included a $20 minimum wage, a statewide moratorium on data centers, and abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Wright asked Gray to explain how someone who has run as a centrist Democrat could be fully aligned with what he described as a “very far-left organization.” Wright, a former Republican lawmaker and Burlington city councilor, zeroed in on Gray’s stated support for taxing the rich.
When asked in the survey “Do you support increasing income tax on Vermonters making over $250,000 per year, and a wealth proceeds tax?” Gray answered, “Yes.”
She explained that she supports raising income taxes to help “recoup” some of President Donald Trump’s federal tax cuts and to pay for universal primary care and reduce property taxes.
But she told Wright she doesn’t agree with the wealth tax.
“I’d have to go back and look at that,” she said.
When pressed about her answer on the survey, agreeing with “the abolition of ICE,” she said she would support its reform.
“ICE is not doing what it was intended to do years ago,” she said.
Gray also explained her support for single-payer health care. In 2014, then-governor Peter Shumlin abandoned the effort as too expensive. Gray said she supports the goal but that it would be best pursued at the federal level as “Medicare for All.” She supports universal primary care in Vermont as the “most immediate step” toward the single-payer goal.
Rodgers’ campaign seized on the radio exchange to again attack Gray. It noted that when she ran for Congress against Balint, she framed the race as a choice between a pragmatic centrist Democrat like herself and the more progressive Balint, whom she suggested would be another member of “the Squad,” the informal group of House progressives that includes U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)
“Vermonters deserve an explanation for what changed between the Molly Gray who ran for Congress in 2022 and the Molly Gray running for lieutenant governor today, who is aligning herself with the most radical fringes of her party,” Rodgers said.
In a statement, Gray reiterated that she wished the race were more focused on the “bread-and-butter issues” that voters care about.
“Vermonters deserve leaders who spend their time delivering on these basic needs — not pointing fingers, dividing Vermonters, bullying or blaming others for the consequences of their own leadership,” she said. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Fighting Words | Lt. Gov. John Rodgers, behind in the polls and cash, takes off the gloves against challenger Molly Gray”
This article appears in October 7 • 2026.
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