In February, a day after President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, Vermont Gov. Phil Scott held his weekly press conference at the Statehouse. He was dressed in his customary suit and tie, standing in front of a small, wooden podium under a line of gold-framed portraits. The night before, Trump had delivered the longest State of the Union in history — blustering about “the Green New Scam,” “the Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota” and plenty more. Scott, however, had made it well into his briefing without mentioning the president at all.
I wasn’t surprised. As one of the reporters who regularly covers these pressers, I figured the governor would try to stick to the local agenda. But still, I wanted to know: What did he think of the address from his party’s leader? As one question wrapped up, I chimed in and said, “The president gave his State of the Union last night. Did you watch it? And if you did, what was your reaction?”
Scott responded with no hesitation: “I did watch it. Nothing was really surprising to me. So, it was more of the same with what we’ve been hearing for quite some time.” He stopped and looked at me. I knew he’d have left it there, so I asked for more. What was unsurprising?
“I think we all could predict what he was going to talk about, in terms of the economy and affordability and so forth,” he said. “From my standpoint, I’ve been talking about the affordability crisis for a number of years. It’s still here.” He continued, “I’m hoping again that we all can take some measures and work together to try to provide more affordability for everyday, average Vermonters and Americans.”
The response — essentially, a quick pivot to state issues — was classic Scott. And it tells you a lot about one of the oddities of American politics during the Trump era: Five times in the past decade, a Republican has been elected to lead Vermont, arguably the country’s most progressive state. At a time when American politics has been almost fully nationalized — when Trump looms over everything — Scott has been a rare GOP politician who has successfully carved out a non-Trump bubble for himself. He is not just America’s last prominent liberal Republican. He is arguably its last truly local governor.
Several months after the press conference, I interviewed Scott at his office in Montpelier. I asked him about his approach to engaging — or not — on Trump-related national issues. “It’s admittedly a bit tricky,” he said. “It’s like you’re on a high wire, and it’s a balancing act.” His goal, he said, is to prioritize what he thinks will help Vermont. “If it’s something that’s good for the state, we want to make sure that we follow through on that, but if it’s counter to our beliefs and counter to the betterment of Vermont, then we say no.” This blueprint, he continued, “doesn’t satisfy everyone. But it’s a strategy that I try to adhere to.”
To say that the strategy has worked for many years would be an understatement. In 2024, on the same day Kamala Harris won Vermont by about 30 points, Scott was reelected by about 50 points, carrying every single city and town in the state. He has frequently polled as the country’s most popular governor.
And now, suddenly, it is all in danger of collapsing. Scott is facing what looks like the strongest challenge of his time in office. His Democratic opponent, Amanda Janoo, a progressive economist running her first-ever campaign, has surprised many Vermonters — including me. She out-fundraised the governor in September and trails him by just 3 points in the latest poll.
What happened? A handful of state-level issues have proven politically tricky for Scott over the past two years, including a cost-cutting push to consolidate small, rural schools and a battle with the state employees’ union over a return-to-office directive. But it also appears that the unpopularity of Trump has finally caught up with him — and maybe with the very notion that any state-level politician can stay insulated from the force of national politics.
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Scott, a native Vermonter, co-owned a construction business before he went into politics. He also spent years behind the wheel at Thunder Road, an amateur racetrack where he is among the winningest drivers of all time.
He first ran for public office in 2000, securing one of three seats in the Vermont Senate representing Washington County. A decade later, he ran for lieutenant governor and won. In Vermont, that job has little responsibility beyond presiding over the Senate. But he earned a good reputation for the way he moderated debates in the chamber, with colleagues calling him “Mr. Civility.”
Six years later — the same year Trump was first elected to the White House — Scott defeated a well-known Democrat to become governor. Facing the voters every two years, he has won by ever-increasing margins since.
Scott considers himself “more of a traditional Republican,” as he put it to me during our interview this summer. “I’m a Reagan-type Republican. I’m a John McCain Republican. I’m a Mitt Romney Republican,” he said. “I’m not a MAGA Republican.” He said he gets asked a lot, “Why don’t you just run as a Democrat?” His response: “Well, because I’m not a Democrat. I’m a moderate Republican. I’m center-right.”
What that’s meant in practice is fiscal conservatism — he insists on “no new taxes and fees” and is running this year partly on cutting taxes — combined with liberal views on social issues. Scott has for years asked the federal government to send more refugees to Vermont to bolster the state’s shrinking workforce; he also supported legislation and an amendment to the state constitution that expanded protections for abortion and other reproductive health care.
In 2018, Scott signed a ban on bump stocks and other reforms to the state’s gun laws, bucking his party in the process. He had resisted tightening gun laws before but changed his mind after a Vermont teen was alleged to have plotted a school shooting in the town of Fair Haven.
Scott’s general popularity grew through the pandemic. After some initial hesitancy, he instituted a statewide mask mandate that would stay in place for about a year. Ultimately, Vermont boasted one of the country’s lowest per capita rates of COVID-19 infection and one of the highest vaccination rates. Anthony Fauci called the state a “model for the country.”
Even as Vermonters have kept returning Scott to office, they have also sent Democratic majorities to the state House and Senate. The partisan split was most pronounced after the 2022 election, when voters elected a Democratic supermajority in both chambers, bolstered by the small but vocal left-wing Vermont Progressive Party. Republicans gained back a wave of seats in the 2024 election — benefitting from voter frustration over rising property taxes — though Democrats remained in control. The GOP gains could largely be attributed to Scott’s coattails. “The governor pretty successfully blamed state Democrats for whatever affordability woes people had,” Kesha Ram Hinsdale, the state Senate’s majority leader, told me.
Indeed, despite his many centrist and liberal stances, Scott has routinely positioned himself at odds with the Legislature. He has issued 65 vetoes over his 10 years in office, more than triple the previous record set by former Gov. Howard Dean, who was in power for 11 years. Scott tends to describe his vetoes as a check on overregulation and irresponsible spending. In some cases, he has succeeded in killing bills; other times, Democrats and Progressives have flexed their muscle to override him, like when they passed a new payroll tax supporting an expansion of child-care subsidies in 2023.
Vermont voters have long viewed Scott as almost singlehandedly balancing out their state politics, said Andrew Smith, a professor at the University of New Hampshire who conducts regular polling on Vermonters. The state has a relatively small budget, about $9 billion, he noted, and “there’s a sense that you need somebody who’s going to be watching the purse strings a little bit.” To many voters, he explained, Scott’s value has been to “basically be a restraint on the Democratic Legislature.”
All the while, Scott has sought to keep national politics at some distance. He thinks Vermont’s three-member congressional delegation does a good job of representing the state, “and I’d rather leave the national politics to them,” he told me.
One of Scott’s political strengths is that he has no interest in making the climb to D.C. himself. “I think there are a number of governors who have higher aspirations that like to get involved in more national politics for different reasons, and I’m just not one of them,” he told me. Lacking national aspirations allows him, he explained, to be a pragmatist and focus on the work of governing. He typically shies away from the national media; he took part in a televised NBC News forum in July, but has made few if any other similar appearances.
Scott has never voted for Trump, writing in a former Vermont Republican governor for president in 2016, voting for Joe Biden in 2020, campaigning for Nikki Haley in the 2024 primary and then voting for Harris in the general election. “I don’t know if the president even knows who I am,” he told me.
When I recently spoke to Janoo, his opponent, she said she thought there was a psychological appeal for Democratic voters in casting a ballot for Scott. “It makes them feel good,” she said, “to support a Republican and believe in our capacity to be more bipartisan — or something like that — as opposed to as polarized as we’ve been of late.”
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And yet, it was never going to be possible for Scott to keep national politics fully at bay — especially as Trump’s aggressive second term has unfolded.
Last summer, when the federal government asked states for access to data on recipients of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, Scott complied — handing over information on about 140,000 Vermonters. The governor’s office said it didn’t see why the administration was not entitled to details about the people its money was helping support. But more than 20 other states sued the Trump administration in response to the request for SNAP data, and won an injunction in court saying they did not have to share the information.
Democrats were left seething. Mike Pieciak, the state treasurer, called the handover “one of largest data breaches in Vermont history.” Food-security advocates said the decision would harm trust in the state government.
Scott’s fine line vis-à-vis Trump has been especially visible over the use of Vermont’s National Guard. Vermont is one of just a handful of states whose air national guard maintains a fleet of F-35A Lightning II fighter jets, among the most technologically advanced in the U.S. Air Force.
Last December, members of Vermont’s guard were mobilized under federal orders to the Caribbean. The guard members were involved in the operation that resulted in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Then, in early 2026, members of Vermont’s guard were deployed for the military buildup around Iran. Plane-spotters captured images of Vermont F-35s at an airport en route to the Middle East.
Since both the Venezuela and Iran deployments were under full command of the federal government, Scott had no say over whether Vermont’s guard was used. But he did have a bully pulpit to criticize those decisions — and often seemed wary of doing so, even when pressed. When I asked in December — several weeks before Maduro’s capture — what Scott thought about the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean, he said, “If we are going to war, then that’s something that the president should share with Congress.” But the line he returned to most was one that kept the focus on Vermont: His biggest concern was for the families of the guard members who were stationed abroad.
On the flip side, Scott has been one of the few Republican governors to turn down Trump’s requests to use the guard on home soil — refusing, for instance, to allow Vermont guard members to patrol D.C. last summer. Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops into major U.S. cities last year was “unconstitutional,” he said at the time — but only after other reporters and I asked him about it.
Meanwhile, Scott has had to navigate another very national development: Trump’s trade war with Canada. The president’s tariffs and insulting rhetoric about Canadians have been bruising for Vermont’s economy and the vitality of its small, rural towns along the northern border. Scott has been a sharp critic of Trump’s approach, even hosting leaders from nearby Canadian provinces for a summit in August touting cross-border friendship. But the issue has proven to be one more way in which Scott — and Vermonters in general — have been unable to avoid Trump.
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In recent years, Democrats seemed to almost give up on the prospect of taking back the governorship. Neither of Scott’s opponents in 2022 or 2024 had held elected office higher than a town selectboard. In 2024, the Democratic nominee raised just shy of $60,000 — far from enough money, even in a very small state, to run a successful campaign. “For several years now, they’ve just kind of thrown a sacrificial lamb out there that didn’t really run a real campaign,” Scott Beck, the state Senate’s Republican minority leader, told me recently.
Janoo has proven different. She beat a better-known candidate in the Democratic primary and has brought in about $1 million, the vast majority from individual contributions.
Her campaign has focused on many of the big themes that are currently dominating national politics. She proposes raising taxes on the rich to pay for free primary and preventive health care across the state. She has also decried the “techno-authoritarianism” driving the boom of artificial intelligence and wants Vermont to put in place “the nation’s strongest public standards for AI.”
In mid-October, Janoo won the backing of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who hadn’t endorsed a candidate for governor in the state since 2020. “I personally like Phil Scott, and I’ve worked with the governor on a number of issues over the years,” he said in a video posted on social media. “But I believe it’s time for a change.”
Her surging support further nationalized the race by prompting the Republican Governors Association to pour money into a local pro-Scott super PAC — $950,000 as of last week, the most since Scott’s first campaign for governor. Janoo, in turn, used that influx to remind voters that Scott and the president share a party label. “Trump Republicans at the Republican Governors Association are trying to buy electoral outcomes in Vermont’s governor’s race,” her campaign wrote in a recent email.
Janoo told me that while she doesn’t see the funding as a direct link between Scott and Trump, “it ties him to this larger national collusion between our federal government and big money.” She cited Elon Musk’s massive donations to the Republican Governors Association and other GOP candidates around the country. “That is why people are sort of losing faith in democracy in the first place,” she said.
I asked Janoo whether Trump’s unpopularity could be contributing to Scott’s slip in support. She said yes, though she thinks it’s really Scott’s economic thinking — “if the government just got out of the way, everything would kind of work out,” as she framed it — that Vermonters are fed up with.
Economic discontent and anti-Trump sentiment, however, may well be connected. Ram Hinsdale, the state Senate majority leader, argued that voters are unhappy with how a Republican president has handled the cost of living, and the governor can’t shield himself from that discontent. “It’s pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that the federal government is costing them,” she told me.
Matthew Dickinson, a political science professor at Middlebury College, thinks the reason Democrats seem to be spurning Scott is that they see him more and more as a partisan operator. Leading up to the 2024 election, and again this year, Scott is asking voters to elect more “commonsense” lawmakers to state House and Senate seats. He may not say “elect Republicans,” Dickinson noted, but the subtext is clear.
Democrats, Dickinson said, might now look back at reasons they have supported Scott — his handling of the pandemic, the gun-control law, the simple fact that he’s “a likeable guy” — and wonder if those rationales are starting to feel a little old. “I think the insulation he used to have by being an anti-Trump Republican — and particularly during COVID, as being above politics — that has eroded,” Dickinson explained. “Increasingly, not every Democrat, but a lot of Democrats, are viewing him as a partisan Republican governor and one who is more likely to block things than to get things done.”
To Beck, the state Senate’s Republican minority leader, the governor has made perfectly clear to voters that he opposes Trump. “The guy says, ‘I repudiate Trump, everything about him. I don’t vote for him,’” Beck told me. “And then the Democratic Party’s like, ‘You’re Trump. You’re like Trump.’ Well, how about why don’t you listen to what he says? Nothing’s changed over the years. What’s changed is the tone from the Democrats.”
Scott himself is more nuanced. “If you put the emotion aside, sometimes you can see clearly that it may not be as bad as it is perceived,” he told me of Trump’s policies. But “how he does it, how he describes it makes it toxic.” Now, as Democrats have grown more and more exasperated with the Trump era, that nuance may have simply become a tougher sell.
Last weekend, while reporting in Cambridge, about an hour north of Montpelier, I met several voters who had supported Scott in the past but were now backing Janoo. One of them, Carl Arnold, 70, used to work for a local chapter of the Democratic Party. He told me Scott had “done some conscientious things, I think, especially with COVID and that sort of thing. And he managed that well.” He also said he thought Scott had at one point done a good job standing up to Trump — but he didn’t feel it’s quite been enough over the past two years. “It’s time for that change, especially in the long scheme of things with the national situation,” Arnold said. “I’m angry over the Republican Party in general.”
Monica Hawkes, 71, told me she “appreciated that he stuck his neck out and took on the NRA and did the gun legislation. So I think I voted for him that year for sure.” But now repudiating Trump feels more important, she said: “I want to do whatever I can to not support him.”
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When I interviewed Scott this summer, it seemed like he was on a glide path to reelection. I assumed this piece would be about the remarkable ability of one politician to disconnect his state’s politics from the partisan patterns of the Trump era. Now, as the election has unfolded, the situation looks much less certain. Maybe Scott survives Tuesday and manages, for another two years, to defy national trends. Or maybe, in the end, there really is no such thing as genuinely local politics in America in 2026.
The week after a poll came out in September showing this year’s race could be close, Scott held a press conference at a farm in Essex to celebrate the state receiving disaster-recovery funding in response to flooding in 2023 and 2024. When a reporter asked Scott why it had taken until this year for the federal dollars to arrive, he kept it vague: “These things take time, and we just have to live with that.” One of his deputies said later that the federal government shutdown in 2025 was partly to blame. In other words, national politics had, yet again, gotten in the way.
Other reporters and I soon turned to the polling. Why did Scott think his popularity had dipped so much? He acknowledged that state-level dustups were causing him some problems. However, when directly asked if the current unpopularity of Trump and the national GOP had an impact, he said, “I don’t think it helps, to be honest with you. I think there is a blue wave coming across our country, and we’re not immune to that.”
Shaun Robinson is VTDigger’s state government and politics reporter.
This article was produced in partnership with VTDigger. It is part of a collaboration between Washington Sun Perspectives and local newsrooms, featuring reporters across the country telling in-depth stories about 2026 races.
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