Russell Berman writes:

For a politician who’s never lost an election, Phil Scott is not much for campaigning. He didn’t formally announce his candidacy last year for a third term as Vermont’s governor until the state filing deadline in May. Scott ran his race, such as it was, out of a small garage on the outskirts of town that he rented to keep his motorcycles. The space had internet but no plumbing, so his two campaign staffers used porta-potties outside. When Scott made occasional visits to the office, he’d reset the mousetraps himself, mostly because his 26-year-old campaign manager refused to do so. During the general election, the governor didn’t run a single television ad.

Not that it mattered. Scott’s bare-bones 2020 campaign was notable only because it delivered to him, a Republican running in America’s bluest state, the largest gubernatorial landslide in the country. Vermont voters handed Joe Biden a wider margin of victory—more than 35 points—than did any other state, but more of them cast their ballots for Scott, who won by 40.

Six months later, Scott is riding even higher. No other state has weathered the COVID-19 pandemic better than Vermont: Its overall per capita case rate and death rate are the lowest on the U.S. mainland, and it has given at least one vaccine dose to the highest percentage of its population. Vermont’s treasury is flush with money, a testament both to the governor’s fiscal prudence—the state was running a surplus before the pandemic—and to the influence of its congressional delegation in Washington.

Democrats control the state legislature and every other statewide office, but the praise they lavish on Scott’s leadership is unreserved and foreign to the zero-sum brutality of modern politics. “He’s done an absolutely tremendous job on COVID,” Representative Peter Welch, Vermont’s lone member of the House, told me. Indeed, Democrats have struggled to beat Scott in part because they can’t seem to find a bad thing to say about him. “He is a rational, thoughtful, and caring Republican,” says former Lieutenant Governor David Zuckerman, the Democrat whom Scott clobbered last year.

How is it possible that a state that sends Bernie Sanders to the Senate every six years has become so enamored with its Republican governor? Scott’s popularity is unusual but not an anomaly: Vermont is now most closely associated politically with environmentalists and the progressivism of Sanders, but before the 1960s, it went more than a century without electing a Democratic governor. Since then, it has essentially alternated between the two parties every few years. Because Sanders runs as an independent, Patrick Leahy remains the only Democrat whom Vermont voters have ever elected to the Senate.

Scott is not the only Republican governing a Democratic stronghold—Charlie Baker in Massachusetts and Larry Hogan in Maryland have also won multiple terms in deep-blue states. Collectively, the trio has shown that at least in some corners of the country, voters will reward Republican politicians who renounce Donald Trump. Scott’s success in Vermont also demonstrates that places still exist where the two parties can govern effectively together. [Continue reading…]