The drive to bring ranked-choice voting back to Burlington — Vermont's most populous city and one of the most liberal in the country — appears to have been quashed.
Mayor Miro Weinberger issued his first veto after eight years in office late last week, blocking a citywide vote in November on whether so-called RCV should be used in future municipal elections. An override vote was scheduled for Monday, but neither side predicted the city council would have the supermajority needed to reverse the veto.
Because RCV has proven most popular in New England and among progressives, the setting for the setback was unusual. Ranked elections have become one of the more popular ideas in the democracy reform world, because they're seen as one of the best ways to reduce combative partisanship by improving the chances for outsider and consensus-minded politicians.
The mayor rejected a measure passed last month by the council, on a 6-5 vote, with all his fellow Democrats opposed. (The council majority is made up of Progressives and independents.) Weinberger said he objected to the $45,000 cost of adding a referendum to the general election ballot and said he worried that debating the "polarizing and divisive issue" of RCV "will consume community attention and resources at a moment in which those finite resources are urgently needed elsewhere."
Under RCV, voters rank candidates in order of preference and, if none of them muster a majority of No. 1 votes and win outright, the person with the fewest top-choice votes is eliminated and those votes are assigned based on their second choices.
That "instant runoff" process continues until one candidate has a majority.
Burlington was one of the first places to use the method in the country. But voters repealed the system in 2010 after a particularly contentious election in which the mayor at the time seemed to have been defeated but ended up re-elected when the instant runoff was over.
Adopting a referendum to go back to RCV would need to be followed by approval by the Legislature and governor — which means it would have almost certainly been delayed beyond next year's mayoral contest, in March. Weinberger has not yet said whether he'll seek reelection.
Council member Jack Hanson decried Weinberger's veto as "inherently undemocratic," adding: "It also is very dangerous rhetoric of, 'Democracy is too expensive, and we don't want to hear from more people on an issue that affects our city.' "
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.