By KT Cappellini
While counting ballots late into the evening on election day, I turned on a TV in our town hall to check on the presidential election results. It was becoming clear that former President Trump was leading in most of the battleground states.
“Please turn that off,” said a fellow vote-counter. “It’s disturbing.”
Such has been the general attitude displayed by many Vermonters towards Mr. Trump since he first ran for President in 2016, and most especially since he lost reelection to Joe Biden in 2020, including the state’s (supposedly) Republican Governor, Phil Scott.
In his victory-lap email to supporters, Scott wrote, “we simply can’t go on like this for much longer. I’ve always believed most Vermonters, and most Americans, are somewhere in the political middle.”
If the middle looks like the most epic political comeback in American history, a decisive capture of the Electoral College AND the popular vote, and a sweep of both the Senate and the House, then Vermonters, and Governor Scott along with them sure have a heck of a long way to go to get there.
As Trump supporter Elon Musk wrote on X, “The people of America gave Donald Trump a crystal clear mandate for change tonight.”
Although perhaps (still) not completely obvious to Governor Scott, a clear majority of the American people from all races and creeds and in all but a handful of mostly elitist coastal states apparently care more about dollars and cents, secure borders, costly foreign wars, and an end to woke madness than they do about abortion rights, transgenderism, racial equity, and climate change.
Moreover, all of the incessant ranting about extremism, insurrection, and the next incarnation of Adolf Hitler, which during the presidential primaries had Governor Scott cheerleading for the war-mongering neocon Nikki Haley, proved no match for the sheer common sense of the American people.
To new members-elect of the Vermont Legislature, Scott also writes, “while you were elected with an “R” or a “D” next to your name, when we arrive in Montpelier in January, we need to put that aside because at the end of the day, we’re all on Team Vermont.”
That’s funny, considering “Team Vermont” has been wearing only one jersey since the dawn of the Democratic Supermajority, and Governor Scott chose to wear it, rather than stick up for the principles of his own party. According to a recent article in the Boston Globe, Scott, while considered the “most popular” governor in America, derives most of his support from Democratic and Independent voters.
On past legislative votes, he was willing to sell out major constituencies, like the gun-rights lobby during the 2018 battle over S.55, in order to garner favor with the Supermajority. Now, when he’s faced with the prospect of many native Vermonters voting with their feet and fleeing the state in droves, because they can no longer afford to live here, he doubles down on “bipartisanship.”
As promised, if he plans to tackle the mounting and massive problems facing everyday Vermonters, like affordability, runaway taxes, education funding, and a housing crises, then Governor Scott needs to dispense with the “man in the middle” banter and actually lead with some conviction.
It may not make you “popular” in certain circles of Vermont to say that the electrification of the state as a future EV paradise is an unrealistic and unaffordable pipe dream, but it will make sense to the average Vermonter who knows in his or her gut that $8-dollar-a-gallon heating oil in one of the coldest states in the Union defies rationality.
Taking a page from Trump’s playbook – and now that Vermont Republicans have just won enough House and Senate seats to finally break the Supermajority and defend a gubernatorial veto – will Governor Scott embrace some “unpopularity,” stand up to Democratic-party lunacy, and say, “enough is enough?”
Otherwise, looking at the solid-red electoral map of Trump’s victory, Vermont risks becoming left behind on the blue fringes with other Democratic-majority states, itself fast-becoming a tourist-driven banana-republic replete with excessive taxation, runaway crime, rampant drug use, and a declining, disparate population of the super-wealthy and working poor.
To borrow from another one of Elon Musk’s posts on X, “let that sink in.”
The author is a Selectman in the town of Plymouth, and ran for State Representative in 2016 and 2022.