Peter Shumlin

Peter Elliott Shumlin (born March 24, 1956) is an American politician from Vermont.

Born in Brattleboro, Vermont, Shumlin went to high school at Buxton School in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and graduated from Wesleyan University in 1979.

Shumlin served on Selectboard for the town of Putney in the 1980s and helped found Landmark College, which was created to help people with learning disabilities gain a college education.

Shumlin's father, George J. Shumlin, a third-generation American, was descended from Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Russia; his mother, Kitty A. (Prins) Shumlin, was from The Hague in the Netherlands, and was Protestant.

Shumlin was appointed by Governor Madeleine M. Kunin to fill a vacancy in the Vermont House of Representatives.

He served part of one term plus one full term, and represented Putney from 1990 through 1993.

He was a member of the Vermont House of Representatives from 1991 to 1993, and represented the Windham District in the Vermont Senate from 1993 to 2003 and again from 2007 to 2011.

In 1992, he was elected to the Vermont Senate, and he soon became Minority Leader.

In the 1996 elections, Shumlin led his Senate Democrats to win back control of the chamber after four years in the minority, and in 1997 he became Senate President Pro Tempore.

He was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor of Vermont in 2002.

In 2002, Shumlin won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor, and lost the general election to Republican Brian Dubie of Essex in a three-way race that included Progressive Anthony Pollina of Middlesex.

From 2003 to 2006, Shumlin returned to the Shumlin family business, Putney Student Travel, an educational firm that allows students in middle and high school to travel to foreign countries, learn about different cultures, and prepare for college.

In 2006, Shumlin ran successfully for his old seat in the State Senate upon the retirement of Rod Gander, who served from 2003 to 2007.

Upon his return, Shumlin was once again elected President Pro Tempore.

On November 16, 2009, Shumlin announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Vermont.

He was first elected to the office in 2010, and was reelected to a second term in 2012.

Shumlin placed first in the five-way August 24, 2010 Democratic primary with 18,276 votes (24.48%).

The close election saw three other candidates come within 3,000 votes of Shumlin.

Former Lieutenant Governor Doug Racine came in second with 18,079 votes (24.22%), Secretary of State of Vermont Deborah Markowitz came in third with 17,579 votes (23.9%) and former State Senator Matt Dunne was fourth with 15,323 votes (20.8%).

State Senator Susan Bartlett came in a distant fifth with 3,759 votes (5.1%).

Racine requested a recount, which confirmed Shumlin as the winner.

Shumlin was not opposed by a Progressive candidate for governor.

The Party had promised not to play a "spoiler" role in the election if he supported single-payer health care, which he did.

Vermont Progressive Party Chair Martha Abbott won the primary election, then withdrew from the race, so the party did not have a candidate on the ballot.

In the general election on November 2, 2010, Shumlin received the most votes, 119,543 (49.44%) to Republican Brian Dubie's 115,212 (47.69%).

Vermont requires candidates for Governor and some other statewide offices to obtain a majority of popular votes, otherwise the winner is chosen by the Vermont General Assembly.

A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 81st governor of Vermont from 2011 to 2017.

Dubie did not contest the vote in the General Assembly, which almost always chooses the candidate who obtained a plurality in the general election, and on January 6, 2011, the General Assembly elected Shumlin by 145 votes (80.6%) to 28 (15.6%).

Vermont and New Hampshire are the only U.S. states whose governors do not serve four-year terms; rather, their governors are elected every two years, always in even-numbered years.

The 2012 election took place on November 6, 2012.

Shumlin, who again was endorsed by organized labor and the major environmental organizations, was unopposed in the Democratic primary and easily won re-election, defeating Republican Randy Brock by 170,749 votes (57.8%) to 110,940 votes (37.6%).

Shumlin was the Democratic nominee for a third term.

Republicans nominated businessman Scott Milne, whose mother Marion Carson Milne served in the Vermont House of Representatives, and father Donald was the longtime Assistant Clerk and Clerk of the Vermont House.

A major campaign promise of Shumlin was to establish a single-payer healthcare system for Vermont.

In 2014 he received a narrow plurality in his race for reelection, but did not attain the 50% threshold mandated by the Constitution of Vermont.

In such cases the Vermont General Assembly elects the winner.

The legislature almost always selects the candidate who received a plurality; this held true, and the General Assembly re-elected Shumlin to a third term by a vote of 110–69 in January 2015.

In June 2015, Shumlin announced that he would not seek re-election in 2016.

He signed laws on physician-assisted suicide as well as the United States' first genetically modified food labeling requirement during his tenure as governor.

He was chair of the Democratic Governors Association during his first two terms.