John Rodgers appeared to be on track early Wednesday to score the biggest upset of Vermont elections by defeating incumbent Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman. With 97 percent of the vote counted, Rodgers led with 46.2 percent to Zuckerman's 44.7 percent of the tally. Rodgers served several years in the Vermont Senate as a Democrat. But the farmer from West Glover ran for LG as a Republican in taking on his former colleague Zuckerman, a Progressive/Democrat farmer from Hinesburg. Another candidate, Ian Diamondstone of the Peace and Justice Party, had 3.7 percent as of early Wednesday. The role of the lieutenant governor is largely ceremonial, with little influence on legislation. The officeholder presides over the Senate and steps in if the governor can no longer serve. Yet the race had become something of a referendum on the affordability challenges in Vermont, with each candidate supporting policies they argued would address the high cost of housing, energy and education. Zuckerman proposed supporting working people by raising taxes on the rich and second-home owners, while Rodgers argued that cost-cutting and other measures such as administrative consolidation and reducing red tape should be pursued first. “Regular Vermonters like me that are out there doing a trade or working as a nurse or a teacher, they’re opening their tax bill and going, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” Rodgers recently told Seven Days. [content-1] In many ways, the two candidates are very similar. They are both married, middle-aged white farmers and long-time Democratic politicians with similar stances on several issues. But their campaigns worked hard to draw sharp distinctions between them, often in highly personal terms. Rodgers painted Zuckerman as a dishonest career politician whose wealth made him less sympathetic to the hardships that higher fees and taxes have created for average Vermonters. Zuckerman questioned whether Rodgers had any real policy solutions and sought to tie him to the “toxic male” politics and policies of the national GOP leaders. Diamondstone, a trade consultant from Putney, was also on the ballot. Unofficial results show Diamondstone won more than 13,000 votes, a number that almost certainly hurt Zuckerman…