The people of Rutland, Vermont, have gained a measure of revenge against former President Obama’s forced influx of Syrian refugees, voting out the five-term mayor who helped negotiate the controversial resettlements with a federal contractor.

Rutland is Vermont’s third-largest city but still very small, with a population of 16,500.

The candidacy of Mayor Christopher Louras went down in flames in Tuesday’s election as he was defeated by the refugee program’s most ardent opponent on the board of aldermen. David Allaire won with 52 percent of the vote to 34 percent for Louras.

“That’s not just a win, that’s a drubbing,” said Don Chioffi, an activist who supported the upstart candidate Allaire.

Louras came out last April and “announced,” much to the surprise of his residents, that the city would be taking in up to 100 Syrian refugees in fiscal 2017 along with others from Iraq. The announcement divided the city among those who wanted to welcome the refugees – no questions asked – and those who thought the refugee program was being dictated without any local input and with very little information. Protests and counter-protests were organized, attracting national media attention.

Unfazed by the division it caused in Rutland, a State Department contractor opened an office and started placing Syrians into the community.

More than 98 percent of Syrian refugees are Sunni Muslim while about 75 percent of Iraqi refugees are either Sunni or Shiite, and they’re just now starting to show up in a small town that doesn’t have a single mosque.

On Tuesday, Louras paid a price for his role in inviting the refugees to Rutland.

City Councilor David Allaire won a four-way race for mayor, stopping Louras from gaining a sixth term.

Both Rutland and Rutland County went for Clinton in the November presidential election, with Clinton winning in a landslide in the city but more narrowly in the county with 13,635 votes to Trump’s 12,479.

Local activist Don Chioffi, an ACT for America chapter leader in Rutland, said Allaire got no help from the local media. But supporters bypassed the newspapers and TV stations by using social media, meetings and a conservative radio host to get their message out.

“The people we talk to always react positively, but you would never know that from the media coverage we get,” Chioffi told WND.

“In their sacrilegious and diabolical effort to squelch the truth, they won’t put it out there, so it’s hard to emphasize how important this victory is because the leftist media just doesn’t give you a fair shake, and we went into it expecting that. We knew we wouldn’t get a fair shake.”

Mayor Louras had negotiated an unpopular refugee deal behind closed doors with the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. USCRI is one of nine exclusive contractors that get paid by the U.S. State Department for every refugee they place into U.S. cities and towns.

USCRI’s budget is funded 97 percent by federal taxpayer dollars, according to its 2014 IRS form 990.

Watch local TV coverage of Rutland’s surprise election blow-back against refugee resettlement: