In some ways, Progressive state representative Emma Mulvaney-Stanak was the underdog in Burlington's mayoral race. The issue of public safety dominated the campaign, and she was up against seasoned City Councilor Joan Shannon, a Democrat whose pledge to crack down on crime won her an endorsement from the police union. As a Prog, Mulvaney-Stanak had to fight the narrative that her party's push to "cut the police" in 2020 had caused downtown disorder — and she had far less campaign cash to do it.

Yet Mulvaney-Stanak ran away with last week's Town Meeting Day election, winning 51.2 percent of all ballots cast, some 900 more votes than her leading opponent.

Aiding her victory was voters' propensity to split the ticket. Mulvaney-Stanak picked up hundreds of extra votes in city wards considered reliably Democratic and where Dem council candidates prevailed. By staying competitive there and running up the margins in Progressive strongholds, Mulvaney-Stanak became the first woman and openly gay person to be elected to lead the Queen City.

In interviews, Mulvaney-Stanak and her team chalked up the win to her moderate message and clear opinion that more police alone won't solve Burlington's problems. When sworn in on April 1, she'll replace Mayor Miro Weinberger, a Democrat who's held office for 12 years.

"The driving factor of this race ... [was] the crossover votes," said Daryn Forgeron, Mulvaney-Stanak's campaign manager. "People felt we built a coalition that carried nuance beyond 'Progressive' and 'Democrat.'"

A former labor organizer with experience winning city council and state legislative races, Mulvaney-Stanak knew how to run a campaign. She grew a team of 300 volunteers with a core group known as "Emma's Entourage" that met weekly on Zoom. The squad was composed of researchers, phone bankers, endorsement seekers — even a "professional nudger" who kept volunteers on task, Forgeron said.

While Team Shannon kept supporters apprised with dozens of emails, Mulvaney-Stanak's crew used social media, posting more than 30 Instagram reels that showed the candidate in action, one garnering more than 26,000 views. In one popular clip, Mulvaney-Stanak used plastic dinosaur toys to demonstrate ranked-choice voting, a method the city used in this year's mayoral election for the first time since 2009.

"Don't tell my kids I borrowed some of their toys this morning," she said conspiratorially to the camera.

Mulvaney-Stanak, who balanced the campaign with parenting two young children and serving as a state legislator, had a full schedule. She carpooled with a colleague so she could call voters while commuting to Montpelier and attended more than 100 events, many of them gatherings in people's living rooms.

Some voters may have been seeking change after 12 years of Mayor Weinberger. Others have suggested that Burlington is truly a Progressive town at heart, given that Weinberger was the first Dem to hold the office in three decades.

But Mulvaney-Stanak also appealed to the middle. She isn't as far left as Max Tracy, the former city council president who lost to Weinberger by just 129 votes in 2021. And she's more moderate than some Progs who ran for council, such as one who campaigned to cap the number of flights at Burlington International Airport over climate concerns. Mulvaney-Stanak has instead said the city should monitor the airport's greenhouse gas emissions.

Her public safety message was also more palatable to moderates. She talked about hiring more cops, not reducing their numbers. She validated residents' concerns about public drug use and homelessness and spoke of her own fear when a hostage situation at a local bar prevented her from picking up her child from school. Some of her campaign literature didn't even mention the Progressive Party — a strategy some Democrats have suggested was disingenuous, though Shannon didn't always include her party affiliation either. Team Emma says it focused on Mulvaney-Stanak's message instead of reducing her to a party label.

As a result, Mulvaney-Stanak won over hundreds of voters who picked Democrats for city council, most notably in Shannon's own South End. In Wards 5 and 6, she earned at least 300 more votes than Progressive-endorsed candidates Lena Greenberg and Will Anderson, respectively, who lost their elections. She also outpaced Tracy's 2021 showing in nearly every competitive ward.

South End resident Jessica Oski voted for Weinberger in 2021 and supported Shannon's council reelection bid in 2023. But this year, Oski picked Mulvaney-Stanak for mayor and incumbent Democratic Councilor Ben Traverse, who defeated Greenberg in Ward 5. Both winning candidates want more police and better oversight, whereas Shannon focused only on the former, Oski said.

"I don't think Joan appreciated how many people do not share her view on policing," said Oski, a member of the city's police commission and a political independent. "I think people were more able to find that space with Emma."

Ward 5 resident Jason Van Driesche, who unsuccessfully challenged Shannon for her council seat in the 2022 Democratic caucus, voted the same way as Oski, in part because he thought Shannon's public safety platform lacked nuance. Shannon wanted people who use drugs in public to be arrested, whereas Mulvaney-Stanak had proposed stationing more police in hot spots to deter the behavior. Tom Worthington, a split-ticket voter in Ward 7, also picked Mulvaney-Stanak, though he didn't think either mayoral candidate had a perfect public safety plan.

"Joan's approach was a little too heavy-handed, and Emma's, too light," he said. "If I have to choose, I'll lean in the direction of compassion. We've seen heavy-handed policy does not work out well for anybody."

Shannon supporters, however, maintain that her message was on point. They blame Shannon's loss on negative social media campaigns such as one led by lets_talk_abt_joan, an anonymous Instagram account that criticized Shannon's record on housing reforms and other policies. One post charged, without providing evidence, that Shannon doesn't tip service workers, which her campaign says is false. Supporters of the account, which wasn't affiliated with Mulvaney-Stanak's team, hung flyers at cafés and on telephone poles that urged voters to pick "literally anyone else." Some people defaced Shannon's campaign signs with stickers.

"When you have folks sharing that on social media and word of mouth, it's hard to control and shut down," said outgoing City Councilor Hannah King (D-Ward 8), who worked as Shannon's campaign manager. King was up for reelection and lost her seat on Town Meeting Day in what was another big win for Progressives.

Democrats say young voters, particularly those concerned about the war in Gaza, helped defeat both King and Shannon. Late last year, King voted for a council resolution calling for a cease-fire. But both she and Shannon voted in late January against putting an item on the ballot that asked voters to make Burlington an "apartheid-free community." A month later, activists confronted Shannon after a debate at the University of Vermont. And on Town Meeting Day, Seven Days was at the Ward 3 polling place when a young man heckled and cursed at King for not supporting the ballot item. Progressive-endorsed Democratic socialist Marek Broderick, a UVM student involved in the pro-Palestine movement, defeated King with 57.2 percent of the vote.

The day after the election, the student vote was a big topic of conversation on "The Morning Drive," a WVMT radio show cohosted by Republican former city council president Kurt Wright. Some callers suggested only long-term residents should be able to cast ballots.

Even before the race was called on election night, people attending Shannon's watch party at Halvorson's Upstreet Café were trading stories about the number of "young people" at the polls.

"Anecdotally, we saw groups of dozens [of students] coming in at Ward 1 and Ward 8," Burlington Democratic Party chair Adam Roof told Seven Days, referring to student-heavy voting districts. But he also acknowledged that he wouldn't be able to accurately measure the student vote for several weeks, when the city clerk's office releases updated voter data showing the addresses of people who returned ballots.

The vote totals, however, suggest that the Dems' prediction could be off. The boundaries of Wards 1 and 8 have shifted slightly since the last mayoral election, but between the two areas, only 37 more voters cast ballots this year than in 2021. In the Progressive stronghold of Ward 2, 300 more people voted this year. Even still, "that doesn't add up to 1,000 more people," Forgeron said, referring to Mulvaney-Stanak's winning margin.

The mayor-elect also performed well in the more conservative New North End, which lacks a high concentration of students. While Mulvaney-Stanak held three roundtables with business owners, she didn't aggressively court students — an approach Tracy took in 2021, her campaign said.

Mulvaney-Stanak instead thinks her message resonated with people in her own demographic: parents with young children and "small p" progressive values. She said a "key turning point" in her campaign was a debate hosted by the United Parent Teacher Organizations of Burlington during which she described her experience raising kids as a queer mom. After the debate, a clip of Mulvaney-Stanak speaking passionately about the need to keep LGBTQ kids safe in schools garnered thousands of views on social media.

The event was also the first time Mulvaney-Stanak could lay out her vision for public safety — or what she calls "community safety" to convey that a safer Burlington needs more than just police. She said that message appealed to people beyond college students and hard-line Progressives.

"A whole wide coalition of people were energized by this," she said.

Former city councilor Rachel Siegel, director of operations for Mulvaney-Stanak's campaign, agreed.

"Once people hear her talk, they're no longer thinking about the Progressive label," she said. "They were voting for Emma."