Politics is personal, but never more so than in Vermont.
In other states, like Pennsylvania or Ohio, actually meeting a gubernatorial candidate is a rarity.
Vermonters, on the other hand, expect to know the candidates, according to Amy Shollenberger, a lobbyist and former campaign manager for Doug Racine.
“In Vermont if you don’t meet the candidate you’re probably not voting for them,” Shollenberger said.
And that, she says, was what gave Republican Phil Scott the edge in last week’s general election over Sue Minter, the Democrat.
Shollenberger said wherever she went on the campaign trail this season, Scott’s team was there, working voters in every corner of the state.
“I was tripping over him everywhere I went,” Shollenberger said. “I think he ran a good campaign, and that’s basically all he had to do.”
The conventional wisdom was it was Scott’s race to lose. He had the edge from the beginning because of his popularity as lieutenant governor, but his textbook retail politics approach put him way over the top, observers say. On Tuesday, the Berlin Republican trounced Minter by 9 percentage points — even with a Democratic presidential candidate carrying the state and a Progressive lieutenant governor winning by a wide margin. Scott ran 20 points ahead of Donald Trump.
While Minter was the underdog from the start, political observers say she could have done more to connect with voters.
Eric Davis, a pundit and retired professor of political science from Middlebury College, says Minter did best in the state’s small cities, such as Burlington and Winooski, where there are concentrations of young people and a management, professional and tech class with higher median incomes and college degrees.
“She wasn’t able to expand her reach to lower income people in small towns,” Davis says.
Scott, on the other hand, “was listening to them and could identify with them in a way that Sue Minter could not,” Davis says, in part because “affordability was his buzz word.”
David Zuckerman, a Progressive from Hinesburg who won the lieutenant governorship, connected with voters, Davis said, largely because of his farmer/politician persona.
Minter, the centrist and pragmatic Democrat, “did 7 percent worse than avowedly Progressive Democrat Zuckerman, particularly in small towns.”
“He came across as someone who was more down to earth and more able to identify with voters in smaller towns,” Davis says. “That ended up being Minter’s problem. She got the professional Democratic base, but she wasn’t able to broaden beyond it.”
Shollenberger says that’s in part because Minter’s campaign staff was from out of state. They ran a traditional campaign that would have worked in a big state like Michigan, but “they never really got it, that that’s not how you win in Vermont,” she says.
Instead of asking people to come out to a party or pick up T-shirts or volunteer, for example, the Minter campaign was constantly on the make for donations. “There was nothing for [volunteers] to do except give money,” Shollenberger says.
Another out-of-state campaign style misstep? Minter was on message all the time.
“She didn’t say unscripted things — even her body language was scripted,” Shollenberger says.
As a result, voters never got to know Minter, “whereas everybody feels like they know Phil Scott,” she said.
“In order to win, she would have had to run a strong campaign that was heavily field based, that introduced her to voters and overcame the Phil Scott is a nice guy and we’ve known him forever factor,” Shollenberger said. “I just don’t think they pulled that off. Or, she would have had to had another $500,000 to blast the state with ads.”
On election night, when Minter was losing almost everywhere, “that just said to me people just didn’t know who she was,” Shollenberger says.
Steve Terry, a WCAX pundit, former Green Mountain Power executive and aide to Sen. George Aiken, says, “Obviously a number of Democrats voted for Phil Scott.”
Minter, who supports background checks for gun show sales, underestimated the impact a direct mailing from the National Rifle Association mail had on the gun control issue, Terry said.
Terry also heard complaints about the Planned Parenthood ads that tied Phil Scott to the anti-abortion Right to Life Committee. The negative ads were paid for with outside money, and Minter tag teamed on the negative messaging at a WCAX debate and in public appearances. That likely turned off some voters, Terry says.
While the end-of-campaign tactics likely had an impact on the governor’s race, Terry says, big picture there was “an overwhelming desire for some kind of balance seemed to be one of the overriding themes” in this election.
(Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the source of funding for the Planned Parenthood ads.)
