It’s been nearly two years since Marek Broderick, then a soft-spoken junior at the University of Vermont (UVM), was first elected to the Burlington City Council as member of the Vermont Progressive Party. Now he is preparing to graduate with a degree in biology while running for reelection tomorrow.
The district Broderick represents, Ward Eight, was initially drawn as a “student gerrymander” that contained up to 75 percent of Burlington’s student population, though it now only contains a plurality of on-campus students, around 46 percent, encompassing the largest of UVM’s dorms and the entirety of Champlain College. Befitting its large student population, Ward Eight has typically produced councilors who were either recent graduates of UVM or current students, trading hands between the Progressives and the Democrats.
Councilors have also shuffled in and out regularly. Before Broderick took office, one of his predecessors had been forced to resign over concerns that she no longer lived in the district after graduating. This resignation triggered a special election, which saw Hannah King defeat Rhone Allison, a member of UVM’s Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) chapter and a classmate of Broderick’s, in a close, low-turnout race. He never imagined that he would be running against King the next year.
The birthplace of Bernie Sanders’s political career, up until recently, Burlington was the place most familiar with democratic socialist politics in the United States. Broderick, however, came to UVM without political experience. Observing politics from a distance as a teenager, he described his introduction to UVM’s YDSA chapter as a matter of one day deciding to get involved in a specifically socialist organization and typing keywords into the campus club search tool. “I’d never heard of DSA before then,” he tells me. Broderick joined UVM YDSA in the spring of 2022, a semester after it was founded, eventually becoming cochair and…
Auteur: William O’Dwyer
