Fmr. Rockefeller Administrator Will Lose Primary

Matt Dunne, candidate for governor of Vermont, currently lags behind the field in fourth place in the race for the Democratic Party's nomination.

Some, though admittedly few, Dartmouth students have followed Matt Dunne in his race for Vermont's governorship. Mr. Dunne, who graduated from Hanover High School in 1987 and then from Brown University in 1992, once worked as the assistant director for the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy. While at Dartmouth, he served in the Vermont senate, and ran for the lieutenant governorship in 2006, winning the Democratic primary but losing the general election. Since 2006, Mr. Dunne has been busy running Google's community affairs initiative.

Mr. Dunne has spent the last several months seeking the Democratic nomination for governor. From the angle of an aspiring political scientist, this race is a frustrating one to watch, with no available public polling data to analyze. Mr. Dunne, who has been a party standard bearer before, is certainly a contender, but he runs amidst some of Vermont's power players.

This evening, polls closed in the gubernatorial primary. With nearly half of all precincts reporting, Mr. Dunne trails in fourth place. He is currently almost 1,900 votes behind the leader, Peter Shumlin, President Pro Tempore of the Vermont senate.

Full standings, courtesy of Vermont Public Radio:

Governor (Dem)

	Votes	%
Susan Bartlett	1,547	5%
Matt Dunne	5,587	19%
Deb Markowitz	7,359	25%
Doug Racine	7,198	25%
Peter Shumlin	7,463	26%
122 of 260 precincts reporting

It will be disappointing if Mr. Dunne loses this race, if for no other reason than that it would be amusing for the Brown University Class of 1992 to have potentially spawned two governors, who are ironically political opposites, serving at the same time: Mr. Dunne and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.

UPDATE: Whilst the election is still too close to call -- only about 700 votes separate first (Mr. Shumlin) and third (Mrs. Markowitz) place -- LGB can safely predict that former associate director of the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy Matt Dunne will not be the Democratic Party's gubernatorial candidate. Mr. Dunne currently trails Mrs. Markowitz by more than 2,000 votes, and trails the leader, Mr. Shumlin, by almost 2,700. We wish Mr. Dunne well, congratulate him on running a substantive campaign, and look forward to hearing more from Mr. Dunne in the future.