New majority leader: ‘We need to be listening to everyone’
The new leader of Vermont’s state Senate says Democrats understand the frustration of voters and are ready to tackle the skyrocketing cost of living.
“Vermonters are holding everything they can together by their fingernails,” said Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Burlington-Southeast.

Ram Hinsdale will serve as Vermont Senate Majority Leader starting Jan. 8, after beating incumbent Majority Leader Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, in a close contest.
Ram Hinsdale will lead a diminished Democratic majority of 17-13 in the Senate. In fact, Vermont had the biggest swing toward Republicans in the Legislature of any state, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (https://tinyurl.com/4attkh39).
The election results show that, although Vermonters are socially liberal, they are financially hurting, she said.
“When I look at the counties that swung red, they are the same places that never recovered economically from the recession when I started in the legislature,” she said.
Skyrocketing costs for housing, health care and property taxes are the major issues driving voters, she said, part of the greater malady of unaffordability in the state.
She says these issues can’t be dealt with in isolation. Vermonters are asking legislators to think in a more interconnected way, Ram Hinsdale said.
“We have some challenges that look like the rest of the country, but we also have some very unique challenges here in Vermont,” she said.
Her involvement in Vermont politics dates back to 2006, when she kicked off a rally at the University of Vermont for Sen. Bernie Sanders. She stressed the issues of student debt and climate change.
Then-Sen. Barack Obama, who Sanders invited to the event, noted Ram Hindsale’s potential in politics.
“If you don’t behave yourself, we’re going to run Kesha for the Senate instead of you,” Obama joked to Sanders.
In 2008, she was elected to serve in the Vermont House of Representatives. one of the youngest state lawmakers in the country.
Ram Hindsale took office during the Great Recession, a time when many Vermonters, especially young people, struggled to make ends meet. She strived to find common ground with her colleagues while articulating the struggles that millennials faced.
During her tenure in public service, Ram Hinsdale has championed climate justice. She identifies as a climate immigrant, moving from her native Los Angeles to Burlington for a better quality of life.
After serving in the legislature for over a decade, Ram Hinsdale has a seat at the head of the table, as the Chair of the Senate Committee on Economic Development and newly majority leader.
“There’s never been a woman who’s chaired the Senate Economic Development Committee, let alone a young woman of color with two young kids,” she said.
As a working mom of two children under 2, she seeks to represent stressed-out parents and plans to address the problem of affordability among struggling families. Chief among them is housing.
“There’s a reason that we use the phrase ‘it hits home.’ There’s nothing more personal than where people live and what surrounds them” she said.
“We need people to be able to live with dignity close to where they work, rather than have to commute miles and miles to get to their job and live a quality life,” she said.
She says she is dedicated to creating affordable housing in places like Charlotte. Vermont consistently has some of the worst housing shortages in the nation. Its rental vacancy rate is only 3.5 percent compared to a national average of 6.9 percent, according to 2022 numbers from the Vermont Housing Finance Agency.
Because of her work on housing issues, Ram Hinsdale has faced conflict of interest allegations. (Her husband, Jacob Hinsdale, manages his family’s property business.) A complaint with the Vermont Senate Ethics Committee was dismissed last spring.
“I would ask that people judge me by my record and my experience,” Ram Hinsdale said.
She says she looks at the challenges of the next legislative session with clear-eyed optimism.
“We really have to be reaching all corners of the state and listening to everyone to make sure that the solutions we come up with actually work for everyone,” she said.
(Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship for The Charlotte News.)