Gov. Phil Scott won reelection of Vermont on Tuesday, 52.5 percent to 45, over progressive Democrat Amanda Janoo. Scott is a Republican in a sea of blue.
Read that again with the rest of the night in mind. Republicans had their worst midterm in more than sixty years. The Senate is gone. The House is gone. And in the single bluest state in America — Bernie’s state, which on the same ballot handed Democrats supermajorities in both legislative chambers and reelected a Democrat to its lone House seat — a Republican won the governorship by seven and a half points.
Vermonters split their tickets on purpose. They voted for Democratic supermajorities and then, in the same booth, declined to let a Democrat run the state. That is a deliberate act, and it tells you something precise about what those voters were buying.
What were they buying? The race turned on affordability, exactly like every other race in the country. The difference was the answer each candidate gave.
Janoo’s answer was the standard progressive package: tax the wealthy, rent control, universal healthcare. Government will fix the price by decree and eventually run out of “other people’s money.” You know the drill.
Scott’s answer was to increase supply. Build more housing. Make permitting simpler at the state and local level. Loosen the development restrictions that keep the housing stock frozen. Cut taxes rather than raise them. Attract working-age people to move to Vermont and work there, so the state can fund its services from a bigger tax base instead of squeezing the people already stuck with the bill. Market-based changes to bring down health insurance costs. Keep nuclear on the table.
That is not moderation. That is the economics conservatives believe in when they are fundraising, applied in the hardest terrain in America, and it came back with a seven-point win on a night when the party was underwater everywhere else.
Which raises the uncomfortable question for the postmortem now underway in Washington.
The argument we hear constantly on the left (mostly) is that principles are a luxury and winning is the only thing. Fine. Caring about winning produced Tuesday for Democrats who at least talked the talk about affordability. Meanwhile, the Republican who actually won in hostile territory was the guy running on accomplishments that congressional Republicans (especially in the Senate) said they were committed to in 2024 but lost their bearings somewhere between then and now.
Voters punished Republicans over the Iran war and the cost of living. There’s no serious dispute about that. And the honest version of the lesson is that a party cannot spend years arguing that government intervention makes things more expensive, then run on its own preferred interventions, and expect anyone to keep the ledger straight. Price increases don’t care which party imposed them. The grocery bill doesn’t check the branding.
Scott offered abundance — more housing, more business, more people, more energy — against an opponent offering crippling socialism with better adjectives. In the bluest state in the union, abundance won.
The DSA is going to keep growing if the only argument against it is a different flavor of the same logic. Beating socialism requires an alternative, not a variation.
There’s a Republican in Montpelier who just demonstrated what that looks like. The party might consider placing a call.
