Long before I shacked up with a politician, I loved Election Day. I find the slow, painstaking process of exercising democracy to be oddly thrilling. Even when I don’t like the results, I can’t get enough of the media coverage after the polls close — the voting maps, the real-time punditry, the official calls for race after race into the night.
Last Tuesday delivered maximum electoral drama: a “bluenami” of Democratic upsets from coast to coast. But at my house, all eyes were on the local contest for Vermont’s auditor of accounts, won by my longtime partner, Tim Ashe.
What’s it like to live with someone seeking a public office that no one really understands? When he wasn’t working in his current job as deputy state auditor, or chairing the board of the Community Health Centers, Tim was on the road, making his case to the voters who would decide whether to hire him.
“Where are you going — Pownal?” I’d ask sleepily on a weekend morning as he loaded up the car for a three-hour drive to meet 25 people. It’s been like that for that past 10 months. I’ve lost track of the number of towns he visited.
At one point in Tim’s political career, I was banned from the newsroom.
This disciplined, methodical approach to statewide campaigning contrasts with some of Tim’s earlier electoral adventures. In 2004, he became the youngest person at the time to win a seat on the Burlington City Council. In 2008, he boldly made a bid for the state Senate, vying for a hard-to-get spot on what was then a six-seat district representing Chittenden County. On election night, vote totals indicated that Tim had lost, but the next day officials discovered a miscount in Burlington; the difference put him over the top.
In 2011, he threw his hat into the ring for mayor of Burlington, where the Democratic nominee was supposed to be chosen by a series of runoffs in a caucus at Memorial Auditorium. Two rounds eliminated Jason Lorber and Bram Kranichfeld — in that order. In the third, Tim initially finished ahead of Miro Weinberger by one vote before officials ultimately judged the runoff a tie. They adjourned the six-hour marathon caucus and reconvened several weeks later to wrap it up, during which time Weinberger garnered enough additional support to win the nomination. He beat Republican nominee Kurt Wright to become mayor.
Through it all, I was banned from the newsroom. I couldn’t weigh in on any stories involving Tim — or even read them before they went to press. I remember some occasions when I couldn’t go home, either, because Tim was holding campaign meetings there. When he returned to the Statehouse, and his fellow senators elected him Senate president pro tempore, Seven Days formalized a conflict-of-interest policy. At the end of every story in which Tim was mentioned, the paper explained our relationship. That disclosure has only surfaced a few times since 2021, when Tim began a five-year break from electoral politics.
In short, Seven Days has a strong team of news editors, most of whom were with the paper during Tim’s time in the legislature and are familiar with the drill. I’m relying on them to make the tough calls about coverage involving Tim, whether I agree with them or not.
In his victory speech on election night, Tim thanked his parents, brother and de facto sister-in-law for traveling north to hold signs for him at the polls. I got a shout-out, too, that was a little more cryptic. “She has a role in a profession that makes it hard for us sometimes to communicate, because we have to have a firewall between us,” Tim said of our 24-year union. “But I obviously couldn’t do this without her moral and emotional support.”
That makes two of us.
This article appears in Winter Preview • 2026.
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