By Rob Roper, for Behind The Lines

Well, that sucked. Pretty much all the gains Vermont Republicans made in 2024 got flushed down the toilet in 2026. The reason was Donald Trump. Can we finally admit it? The guy is politically undisciplined, thoroughly unlikeable, and a megalomaniacal, narcissistic jerk (for lack of a better word that can be published in family papers), who is not and never was a conservative. Conservatives don’t love tariffs. Conservatives don’t promise $5000 checks from the treasury. Normies don’t insist on putting their name on every piece of geography and architecture under the sun….

Trump told people go to the polls pretending his name was on the ballot (as well as, presumably, the Kennedy Center), and they did.

But this article is not about Donald Trump, it’s about the Vermont Republicans. I’m not sure there is anything Vermont Republicans could have done differently that could have held back this tide. They did a lot of things right: they raised money, recruited good candidates for competitive seats, put together a solid campaign platform…. But I do think they made some serious mistakes following their 2024 victories that could have been avoided, and I sincerely hope they don’t make them again.

In my humble opinion, after November 2024, Vermont’s elected Republicans seemed to forget how and why they picked up seats and acted as if they were more relevant inside the State House than they actually were.

During the 2023-24 legislative session of the Democrat Supermajority, Republicans framed themselves in stark contrast to the Democrats/Progressives. They were a unified party of NO. No new taxes. No higher heating bills. No higher electric bills. No DMV fee hikes. No pay raises for legislators. And, most importantly, no higher property taxes. They stood their ground on all these issues and put the opposition on the record with party line roll call vote after roll call vote. Republicans lost every major fight inside the building, but through every loss they connected with real people outside the building who agreed with them on every issue and wished they’d won.

The simple but effective strategy was let the majority party put forward unpopular legislation, oppose it very publicly, and hold them accountable for it. It worked. Republicans won a historic but incomplete victory. Key word: incomplete. They should never have stopped running this play.

But in January 2025, the Republican legislators inexplicably abandoned the approach. Rather than continuing to highlight contrast, they shifted gears back to tried and failed for all eight years of the Scott Administration strategy of “let’s show the people we can work together” with a focus on inside-the-building politics. All this did was muddle public perception of any difference between the parties. (Although, to their credit, they did push votes on the Clean Heat Standard and Act 181.)

First mistake: not running a Republican for Speaker of the House and President Pro Tem who could have defined for folks outside the building what a future Republican majority policy agenda would look like. Instead, strategy turned to back-room haggling over the number of committee chairs and vice chairs Republicans could get for backing whichever non-Republican candidate was willing to trade for votes. This who-gets-to-wear-a-paper-hat-in-the-treehouse scramble is about egos more than anything. All it does is make more of the minority party leadership beholden and answerable to the majority party’s leadership. And that makes contrast harder to achieve.

Then, worse, Republicans turned the table on themselves – as a minority without the votes to pass anything, no less – by immediately proposing and putting their political capital behind a hugely unpopular piece legislation in Phil Scott’s utterly tone-deaf education restructuring scheme. Republicans couldn’t pass the thing themselves, and Democrats had zero incentive to help them. It was destined to be a political loser, and Republicans opened themselves up to two years’ worth of the same types of attacks that led to their opponents’ demise just months earlier. This was bafflingly stupid.

Republicans won their elections based primarily on opposition to property taxes and promises to rectify in some measure the 14% increase that left Vermonters reeling and angry at the Democrats. Not only did Scott’s proposal do nothing to lower property taxes immediately, but it also didn’t even claim to start “bending the cost curve” for several years, if ever. The deal for Vermonters was basically you lose local control over your budgets, throughout rural Vermont you will lose school choice and/or schools to choose, you will lose your local school boards and in some cases your local schools entirely, and in return for those sacrifices… you still get stuck with and higher property tax bills for, presumably, ever.

Nobody said sign me up for that! And Democrats spent two gleeful years successfully blowing holes in it as the party of NO.

What House and Senate Republicans should have done was say on day one of January 2025, “We will not sign onto any piece of legislation that raises taxes (especially property taxes), fees, or regulatory costs on our constituents. Period.” That includes the budget. That includes the Yield Bill. That includes the fee bill. And, yes, governor, that includes Act 73. Then held a roll call vote on every bill that did so.

To maintain contrast, they should have put forward a few popular, poll-tested policy ideas that appealed to at least 65 percent of the electorate and dared the Democrats to publicly reject them — which they certainly would have. One example, a Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which polling indicated a landslide majority of Vermonters approved of. Another, the Vermont Promise platform idea of generating a 35-cent reduction in property taxes by shifting income sensitivity to the general fund was a good one. I wish Republicans had been pushing it (and other elements of Vermont Promise) for two years instead of a few months.

The last observation I’ll share as this post is getting long (fear not, I’m sure there will be more along this theme in the future) is that Republican legislators make a huge mistake in trying to be “Phil Scott.” Phil Scott is a unicorn. His popularity is not the result of a package of policy positions one can copy and expect the same results. His personality is not something someone else can just put on like a mask and expect it to similarly resonate. Scott was a famous race car driver before he entered politics. As such, voter’s relationship with him was first formed and cemented outside of politics. Then he served ten years in the state senate, six years as lieutenant governor, and now ten years as governor. Nobody else has that track record. It can’t be bottled and passed around down the ticket to somebody nobody’s heard of and is running for the first time. Stop trying.

So, legislative Republicans cannot depend on Phil Scott’s brand for their own success. They need to create their own brand, even if it is on occasion in opposition to Scott (cough, cough, education reform and property taxes). You’ve got two years to do this. Because my first prediction for 2028 is that Phil Scott won’t be running again.

Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 25 years of experience in Vermont politics including three years service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free market think tank.