BRATTLEBORO-Now that the 2025-26 Vermont Legislative session is in the books, both Democrats and Republicans are claiming wins.
And as we head into the Aug. 11 party primaries, both sides are campaigning on what they have already accomplished.
Whoever wins or loses, Vermont politics is about to change dramatically. One reason is that more than 30 legislators are retiring this year. Among the most notable are two Democrats, Speaker of the House Jill Krowinski and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth.
With many committee chair leadership positions becoming vacant because of these retirements, the upcoming elections will be vital in deciding how the Legislature functions in the 2026 biennium.
Nationally, Republicans flipped enough legislative seats in statehouses to provide a net 50-seat gain, and half of those wins came from Vermont alone.
In Vermont’s last election in 2024, Republicans won a net 19 seats out of 150 in the House and boosted their minority caucus from 37 members to 56. In the Senate, Republicans flipped six seats in the 30-seat chamber and brought their caucus to 13.
Though State Democrats and their allies in the Progressive Party still controlled the agenda in both chambers during the last session, Republicans, including Gov. Phil Scott, are still publicly gloating over the fall of the Democratic-plus-Progressive 2023-24 supermajority that overrode six of Scott’s vetoes in 2024.
Will the new 2026-28 Legislature completely retreat from its former progressive policies? Will it change its agenda? Will it reshuffle its priorities?
Competing visions
Two potential visions are competing for the 2027-28 Legislative biennium.
“We’ve now spent an entire session undoing harmful policies passed by the previous supermajority,” Scott said at a press conference in June.
The chair of the Vermont Republican Party, Paul Dame, as reported by VTDigger, said in a newsletter that “if Vermont’s Republicans are not the most effective minority in any legislature in the country, then I’d like to hear who is.”
He went on to say that the GOP accomplished its goals, “in ways that seemed impossible just two years ago.”
Meanwhile, Democrats are claiming success in the areas of affordability, protecting Vermonters from forced school mergers and health care, among other priorities from across the aisle.
The last Legislature revised Act 181 and did away with the Clean Heat Standard, which did not yet even exist, to give two examples of its retreat from supermajority status.
It left some vital issues like education, housing, economic development, and healthcare for the next Legislature to solve.
“Leadership turnover, retirements, loss of veto-proof majorities, and a different political center of gravity mean 2027 will not be business as usual,” said Andrew Brewer, manager of government and public affairs at Downs Rachlin Martin, the state’s largest law firm.
Brewer offered his opinions on the session that has just ended, and the 2027-28 session to come, at the Brattleboro Development Credit Corp. (BDCC) CEO roundtable at the SIT International Center in Brattleboro on July 7.
‘Reset and retreat’
Brewer called the 2024 general election “kind of a bit of a red wave.”
“The basic takeaway is that this was a session of reset and retreat,” he said.
“Especially, the Legislature backed away from some big supermajority area policies around Act 250, education, of course, a clean heat standard, maybe even a change of mindset about broad mandates for future legislators and legislatures to deal with,” Brewer continued.
He said none of these issues are dead, “but education, housing, land use, economic development, and healthcare are all being reworked. And they require a lot more work moving forward, but again, with different leaders, with different mindset, a reshuffle,” he said. “There’s a lot of turnover and retirements, and that’s going to be really impactful next session.”
The new key word in Vermont politics is “affordability.”
Vermonters in general feel that the state has become too expensive. The population is small, property taxes keep rising, housing (especially affordable housing) is still largely unavailable, the healthcare system is crumbling, and poll after poll shows younger people saying they cannot afford to remain here to raise their families.
While most people praise Vermont for its natural beauty and its deep sense of community, these attributes have become almost unreachable luxuries for a large majority of Vermonters as well as would-be Vermonters.
Legislators in the 2025-26 session recognized this.
With Democrats still in the majority in the House and Senate, they “responded to the call from Vermonters across the state to prioritize the cost of living,” said state Sen. Wendy Harrison, D-Windham.
Some wins, some losses
One of the most important things that the Legislature accomplished was to stop Scott’s plan to consolidate all of Vermont’s school districts into five super-districts, lawmakers have said.
“What we heard loud and clear across the state is that the governor’s plan to take the current 119 school districts and squeeze them into five mega-districts was not the way to go,” Rep. Mike Mrowicki, D-Putney, said in an end-of-session message to voters. “Fiscal models also showed there really weren’t savings in that plan.”
“Democrats stood up for our constituents, who were loud and clear that they did not want Gov. Scott’s forced mergers, and instead worked with community members, education leaders, parents, and students to advance a voluntary, community-driven education reform process that is focused on quality, equity and affordability,” Harrison said.
When it came to Act 250, after the Land Use Review Board released preliminary conservation maps that did not match Act 181’s intent — and a backlash that followed the release — “Democrats acted swiftly by rolling back the conservation-mapping provisions,” Harrison said. “Democrats were responsive to constituents, not to Republican pressure.”
Additionally, Democrats led movements to successfully increase renter and down-payment assistance tax credits, Harrison said. They invested $36 million in building more housing that Vermonters can afford. And they removed local zoning practices that have stymied new housing development.
“We passed legislation to stabilize education funding and reduce pressure on property taxpayers,” Harrison said. “We passed a tax on second homes and set the stage for a ‘foundation formula,’ which will make education spending more predictable and equitable.”
Democrats also “prioritized protecting Vermonters from the harms of the Trump administration,” Harrison said.
“We passed legislation that will ensure Vermont schools do not provide sensitive information about a student to a federal agency,” Harrison said. “It will require that a federal immigration authority present a judicial warrant before entering a school.”
Democrats also gave Vermonters “a stronger path to protect themselves from and seek accountability for unlawful searches, violations of free speech, due process, or equal protection under the law,” Harrison said. “We expanded protections against warrantless civil arrests in schools, polling places, healthcare facilities, and other sensitive locations.”
The Legislature also “passed legislation to control skyrocketing healthcare costs, which impact Vermont families, small businesses, school budgets, and property tax payers,” Harrison said. “This bill would have lowered premiums, with savings beginning in 2027. Democratic leadership created and passed this bill with large bipartisan majorities, and then it was vetoed by Gov. Scott, who sided with industry interests over the affordability needs of Vermonters.”
Data centers were another issue where Democrats conflicted with Scott, who vetoed their data center protections bill to ensure Vermonters don’t subsidize large tech corporations parachuting into the state and using its land and water for private profit.
Scott vetoed the bill after the Koch political network fought it, reported the Vermont Natural Resources Council, despite “overwhelming, tripartisan support, passing 26-3 in the Senate and with a near-unanimous voice vote in the House.”
The main issues in the Legislature last year were livability and affordability, with more than 100 new laws on a range of issues, including disaster relief for farmers, survivor benefits, debt collection, event ticketing, business growth, unclaimed property, drug prices, green energy, and consumer protection.
“This past year, Democrats led a bipartisan majority to advance legislation laser-focused on addressing the cost of living and protecting Vermonters from the harms of the Trump administration and large outside corporate interests,” Harrison said.
“On healthcare, we’ve set in place steps to control costs, especially on pharmaceuticals and by initiating referenced-based pricing to make costs more uniform across the state,” Mrowicki said.
He cited the new ArrayRx plan, the brainchild of State Treasurer Mike Pieciak, in which Vermont plans to join Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Nevada, and Connecticut to leverage lower drug costs for their residents.
A federal waiver would be required “to help cover the 60% of Vermonters on Medicaid or Medicare.” Acknowledging that there is “no hope” of getting that waiver from U.S. President Donald Trump, “we are preparing for a leadership change in 2028, so we can be ready,” Mrowicki said.
Survey says...
While polls indicate that Scott — unopposed in the Republican primary election — still has the lead for the general election as he runs for an unprecedented sixth term in office, his approval ratings have dropped. The latest University of New Hampshire Survey Center Green Mountain State Poll, released July 21, has him at 48% approval and 43% disapproval.
On the Democratic side, two women are competing in the Aug. 11 primary, Aly Richards and Amanda Janoo, with the winner facing Scott on the ballot in November.
Both have little name recognition now, but Scott’s decline in public approval makes him more vulnerable to a Democratic challenger.
As Brewer describes it, “It’s a recognition election. For both governor and lieutenant governor, the biggest ‘candidate’ in the race is the undecided voter.”
The UNH polling supports that statement. In its latest poll, 52% of likely voters in the Democratic primary said they were undecided. The July poll also found Janoo has a 26% to 19% lead over Richards.
The 2026 elections offer Vermonters “a new political landscape,” Brewer said.
Some of the issues driving the election debate, Brewer said, will be education reform, its cost and its implementation; property taxes and affordability; land use and housing policy; health care costs; and workforce shortages.
“2026 was the reset,” Brewer said. “2027 will determine the direction.”
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.