An advocacy group’s new poll put the issue at the center of the Chittenden County State’s Attorney race. The August vote turnout will be the real test.
Public safety is one of the questions Vermonters keep returning to — in the Statehouse, in downtowns around the state, and increasingly at the ballot box.
Nowhere is the argument sharper right now than in Chittenden County, where a new poll has put it at the center of the race for State’s Attorney — and how voters read that poll could help shape who wins.
The survey, released June 8 by Campaign for Vermont Prosperity, an advocacy nonprofit that describes itself as nonpartisan, questioned 512 likely Chittenden County voters about crime, safety, and the office most associated with both. The number the group put at the top of its announcement: challenger Bram Kranichfeld leads two-term incumbent Sarah George by 15 points, 35 to 20, with 45 percent undecided.
It is worth saying clearly at the outset what this poll is and isn’t. It was not commissioned by either campaign. Executive Director Ben Kinsley told Compass that Campaign for Vermont designed the questionnaire internally and paid for it from its own operating funds, with no candidate involvement; Kranichfeld confirmed independently that he had no advance knowledge of it. No campaign put a thumb on the scale. That is a fair point in the poll’s favor, and it is the right place to start.
It is not, however, a reason to take the headline number at face value — because that number describes a far broader electorate than the one that will actually choose the next State’s Attorney.
Both George and Kranichfeld are Democrats, a primary matchup Compass covered when Kranichfeld entered the race in March. In Chittenden County — the most populous and among the most Democratic counties in the state — no Republican has entered the race, which makes the August 11 Democratic primary the contest that effectively chooses the next State’s Attorney. And the poll’s two head-to-head figures point in opposite directions depending on who is counted. Among all likely voters, Kranichfeld leads by 15. Among Democrats — the voters who decide August 11 — George leads by 15. Campaign for Vermont’s own write-up notes George is “deeply underwater with Independents and Republicans,” and that is precisely where Kranichfeld’s overall edge comes from: respondents who will not cast a ballot in the Democratic primary.
Asked directly whether leading with the all-voters figure implied George would lose the primary, Kinsley said it did not. Primaries are hard to predict, he noted, particularly in Vermont, where any voter can request a party’s ballot. But, he acknowledged, George “has better numbers among Democrats and that’s a leg up in the primary.”
Whose voters show up in August
That open-primary point is the real complication. Because Vermont voters choose a party’s ballot at the polls rather than registering by party, the August Democratic electorate will not be limited to self-identified Democrats. Independents — who have no primary of their own, and who lean toward Kranichfeld in this poll — can freely take a Democratic ballot. So, in principle, can Republican-leaning voters. How many do, and which way they break, is unknown.
And it is exactly what this survey cannot measure. Its sample is screened for likely general-election voters — a far larger and different group than the small, highly engaged universe that turns out for an August primary. So while George leads among the voters the poll identifies as Democrats, whether that lead holds among the people who actually show up in August is a question the instrument was not built to answer.
Both campaigns read it the same way
The most telling confirmation comes from the candidates themselves. Neither treats the all-voters number as the score that counts.
George, in a written statement to Compass, pointed past it: “Even with that framing, this poll shows me leading the Democratic primary by fifteen points.” She added that the result reflected voters’ ability to “spot the difference between an honest conversation and a loaded one” — her interpretation; the poll shows she leads among Democrats but does not establish why. She also defended her record and asked that the full questionnaire be released alongside the toplines.
Kranichfeld, who confirmed he had no advance knowledge of the poll, cast himself not as a front-runner but as a challenger with work to do: “Running against an incumbent is a tough race,” he wrote, urging “voters who want a change in Chittenden County to make their voices heard in the Democratic primary in August.”
A challenger said to lead by 15 declining to claim he is winning, and an incumbent said to trail pointing to her own 15-point lead — both, independently, locating the real contest in the August primary.
What the poll found
On its own terms, the survey reports a county uneasy about safety, and that unease is not a Campaign for Vermont invention. By the group’s own figures, 79 percent of respondents view local law enforcement favorably. Sixty-eight percent say they would feel unsafe walking alone in downtown Burlington at night — a finding the group reported across party lines, with 58 percent of Democrats, 87 percent of Republicans, and 72 percent of Independents saying they feel somewhat or very unsafe. Seventy-nine percent say crime in the county has worsened over ten years; 42 percent name drug-related crimes the most urgent issue to address, and 24 percent homelessness. Fifty-one percent disapprove of George’s job performance — 37 percent strongly — while among Democrats she keeps a narrow positive rating, and 31 percent name her as bearing primary responsibility for public safety, more than any other official named.
The concern is corroborated well beyond this poll. Over the past year, roughly 100 or more downtown business owners have signed open letters to Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak demanding action on safety; the Burlington Business Association reported that a large share of downtown businesses have seen falling foot traffic and lost staff over safety concerns; and the City Council has spent on downtown patrols in response. Those are real indicators of public anxiety — though not, in themselves, proof that crime has risen.
What that anxiety does not settle is the underlying facts of crime itself. Kinsley was direct that the worsened-crime figure measures sentiment, not statistics: it is “strictly voter perception,” he said, adding that whether actual rates have risen is a separate question with its own data. This piece concerns the poll, not the underlying crime trends, which Compass did not independently assess here.
Who built it, and what hasn’t been released
The survey was conducted April 30 to May 4, using a mix of automated calls, live dialing, and text messages, weighted to Census demographics, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.33 percentage points. Campaign for Vermont designed the questionnaire itself and contracted an outside call center to place the calls, Kinsley said — though he could not name the vendor during the interview and said he would look it up. [FLAG: vendor name still outstanding] The poll cost roughly $6,000 to $7,000, paid from operating funds; no donor earmarked it. Campaign for Vermont is a 501(c)(4) organization that does not take positions on candidates, Kinsley said: the data is “out there for people to interpret however they want.”
The posted results include toplines and party crosstabs but not the full questionnaire in field order or complete crosstabulations. Those, Kinsley said, are kept confidential, citing concern that screening questions could expose personally identifiable information. That withholding is now contested by the candidate the poll most concerns: George’s call to publish the full questionnaire puts an organization whose stated mission is transparency at odds with the incumbent it surveyed over exactly that — disclosure.
The questions behind the numbers
The wording of two questions does work that topline percentages obscure — and because Campaign for Vermont wrote the instrument in-house, that wording reflects the group’s choices, not an independent firm’s.
One asked respondents to choose between wanting prosecutors to “prosecute crimes and hold offenders accountable,” favored by 69 percent, and preferring “a focus on prosecutorial discretion and addressing root causes,” at 31 percent. The framing puts the affirmative term — accountability — on one side of a choice working prosecutors do not actually face as an either/or; discretion and accountability are exercised together.
Another carried the survey’s most charged topic. It described a March federal immigration raid in South Burlington, noting that some viewed the protests as largely non-violent while others said protesters assaulted law enforcement — then asked whether those “taken into custody for resisting arrest or assaulting law enforcement” should be charged, carrying that second, contested characterization into the operative question. Whether the order in which respondents heard questions like these shaped their answers to the approval and head-to-head items is something only the full field-order questionnaire would show — and Campaign for Vermont has not released it.
Why it matters
A poll is a tool, and like any tool it can be aimed. The anxiety this one captures is real, and it crosses party lines. The disagreement it points to is real too: one candidate argues that an approach pairing accountability with treatment has made the county safer, the other that voters are ready for a different balance. Both of those things are live, and the poll captures them.
What it cannot tell you — what no June survey can — is how much that anxiety will move a voter, which ballot they will choose, and who will care enough to show up. The headline number describes an electorate that will not pick the next State’s Attorney. The number that will points the other way. How much crime weighs on the decision, and on whom, will only be known in August.
The post Poll: Public Safety is the question Vermont keeps asking. Chittenden County is where it’s loudest. first appeared on Vermont Daily Chronicle.
The post Poll: Public Safety is the question Vermont keeps asking. Chittenden County is where it’s loudest. appeared first on Vermont Daily Chronicle.
