(Jon Margolis writes political columns for VTDigger. His opinions are his own.)
[T]he day after last month’s election, the leaders of the California State Legislature issued a statement in both English and Spanish.
“Today,” the House and Senate leaders wrote, “we woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land, because yesterday Americans expressed their views on a pluralistic and democratic society that are clearly inconsistent with the values of the people of California. We will lead the resistance to any effort that would shred our social fabric or our Constitution.”
California is not like Vermont. It’s warm out there, even in December. California has many more people than any other state, many of them living in big cities. Vermont has slightly more people than Wyoming, and none of them live in big cities. California is a majority-minority state. Vermont is 95 percent non-Hispanic white. About 25 percent of Californians, but precious few Vermonters, speak a language other than English at home.
Yet one need not search too hard to find Vermonters – arguably a substantial majority of them – who have also been feeling like “strangers in a foreign land” this past month, culturally as well as politically. Like their fellow citizens in 19 other states (plus the District of Columbia), most Vermonters might be finding themselves the odd people out these days.
Or more than their fellow citizens in those other states. Donald Trump got a smaller percentage of the vote (29.71 percent) in Vermont than in any other state. (Hawaii, at 30.1 percent, was next; Trump won 31.8 percent of Californians). So as the nation enters the Trump era, Vermont finds itself somewhere between marching to a different drummer, preparing to resist, and in a funk.
Putting things into some perspective, those California lawmakers (who were clearly in a funk) may have been more discouraged than the evidence warranted. As it turns out, a clear if modest majority of 54 percent of the American people did not vote for Donald Trump. Some 2.8 million more of them (a 2 percent margin) voted for Hillary Clinton than for Trump.
Still, Trump won an Electoral College majority, meaning he gets to govern. Considering how he indicated he’d like to govern, it’s no wonder that many anti-Trump – or even just non-Trump – voters feel ill at ease. That would seem to include some 70 percent of Vermonters.
Yes, Vermont elected a Republican governor. But though Phil Scott’s victory made the state’s Republicans happier, it also obscured the fact that the election proved just how Democratic this state is. Democrats swept every other statewide contest and maintained their dominance in the Legislature. Scott’s victory was personal, not partisan.
Besides, Phil Scott is not a Donald Trump-style Republican. He announced early that he would not vote for Trump, and on several key issues, he agrees with those California lawmakers more than with his own party’s president-elect.
So it should surprise nobody if Vermont’s state government, as well as many of its rank-and-file citizens, join California in that resistance. Considering the differences in regional culture (California brashness, New England reticence) Vermonters are likely to resist more decorously, but just as energetically, in at least four areas:
Immigration: Trump has threatened to penalize “sanctuary cities” which refuse to help federal officials deport undocumented immigrants. Vermont has effectively been a sanctuary state for years, with a policy stating that “State Police troopers should not try to identify people whose only suspected violation is that they are present in the United States without proper documentation.” Scott agrees with that policy, and he is likely to have the support here of the new attorney general, T.J. Donovan, who said he would be “prepared to stand up to the federal government” to protect the rights of immigrants.
Education: Trump and his chosen education secretary have called for “repeal” of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Phil Scott has voiced no opposition to the Common Core, which has been embraced by the state Agency of Education (and which cannot be “repealed” by the federal government because it is not federal law).
Health care: Scott wants to keep as many Vermonters as possible covered by health insurance, many of whom are covered under the Affordable Care Act, which Trump and Republican congressional leaders have pledged to repeal. According to Vermont Health Connect (which Scott wants to dump in favor of joining another exchange), about 77,000 people in the state have qualified health plans under the law either as individuals or through their employers. There are also roughly 170,000 Vermonters covered by Medicaid, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (and thanks to the folks at Kaiser Family Foundation for finding this information). Before the ACA took effect, about 161,000 Vermonters were on Medicaid, indicating that perhaps 9,000 low-income people would lose health insurance were the act repealed.
(Medicaid funds are used to help pay for the health care of another 37,000 people in Vermont. But they are not “on Medicaid” as the term is commonly understood. Medicaid is not their primary health insurer.)
Environment: Trump said “Nobody really knows” if climate change is real. Scott accepts the scientific consensus that it is, and that it is at least partly caused by humans burning fossil fuels.
It could be interesting to see how – or whether – the state resists or even opposes Trump administration efforts to get it to change policies. More than most states, Vermont depends on federal funds.
But more than most states, Vermont is full of people who do not merely dissent from what is likely to be coming from Washington but who are feeling somewhat like strangers in a foreign land in a way they would not have if, say, Mitt Romney had beaten Barack Obama in 2012.
That would have been mere politics and policy. But the gulf between most Vermonters and the powers-that-are-about-to-be in Washington is not just political. It’s not even just cultural. It’s a difference in the way a person relates to the world.
(To be continued.)
