Jon Margolis is a political columnist for VTDigger.
That certainly is a great big lead incumbent Republican Gov. Phil Scott has over challenger David Zuckerman in the latest poll.
If anything, “great big” understates the case. Scott leads Zuckerman by 31 percentage points. Even in states where one party dominates, the challenger usually comes closer than that. And in this state, the dominant party is (sort of) Zuckerman’s. He’s the Democratic candidate despite his long association with the Progressives.
All of which makes Scott’s supremacy all the more impressive in the poll from Vermont Public Radio and Vermont PBS.
But take a closer look at the numbers. Scott’s 31-point lead is not something like 65%-to-34%, even though in the same poll 68% approve of the job he’s doing as governor. His lead is 55%-to-24%.
A healthy lead and probably (absent some bizarre and unforeseeable occurrence) insurmountable. But not a huge percentage for such a popular incumbent. What stands out is not the enormity of Scott’s support but the paucity of Zuckerman’s. In a Democratic state, the Democratic Party candidate for governor can’t draw the votes of a quarter of the electorate six weeks before Election Day.
Part of Zuckerman’s problem here is that business of him not really being a Democrat, at least in the eyes of many Democrats. He first ran for the Legislature as a Progressive, and was often critical of Democrats. Some Democrats remember, which could help explain why Scott is running ahead of him 48%-to-41% among self-identified Democrats.
As interesting as Zuckerman’s paltry 24% is the 19% of the poll sample who said they were undecided, indifferent, or planning to vote for a couple of other guys you’ve never heard of.
Both major candidates are well-known incumbents. Because one is decidedly (if moderately) conservative and the other unwaveringly progressive, they present a stark political contrast. It’s an easy choice, but almost one voter in five can’t or won’t make it.
Vermont, it seems, has a sizable constituency of the wishy-washy.
A constituency perhaps also evident in the poll results in the race for lieutenant governor. That one is just about tied, with 35% for Democrat Molly Gray, 31% for Republican Scott Milne. That’s only two-thirds of the sample. Six percent of the rest support minor candidates, 4% are for no one or are not voting, and 24% say “Other/Not sure/No opinion.”
In this case, neither candidate is all that well-known, which could help explain the tepid level of support for either. Milne has run and lost two statewide races, one for governor, one for U.S. senator. But losing candidates rarely make much of a splash. Gray came out of obscurity (otherwise known as “nowhere”) a few weeks ago and won the Democratic primary thanks to spending a lot of money on television advertising, winning about 44% of 109,365 primary votes.
Expect some four times as many votes in this general election. That’s a whole lot of voters who paid little or no attention to last month’s primary. She made herself a household name in a few households. It will be interesting to see whether she can outspend Milne by as much as she outspent her primary opponents.
It’s also possible that the lackluster support for both candidates is due to the fact that many voters don’t much care who becomes lieutenant governor because the lieutenant governor doesn’t do much.
(Another poll gives Gray a 53%-to-31% lead. The poll was commissioned by the liberal-leaning Alliance for a Better Vermont, conducted by the openly progressive Lake Research Associates, and used a different method, combining strong and weak support for a candidate and asking undecided respondents which way they “leaned.” None of that invalidates the poll, whose results were otherwise consistent with the findings of the VPR/PBS survey.)
Another interesting finding in the poll is that Scott could threaten Sen. Patrick Leahy should he challenge a Leahy bid for a ninth term in 2022. In fact, the poll showed that were that election held today, Scott would edge Leahy (whose approval rating is a healthy 56%) by 41%-to-38%, with 7% saying they would vote for “neither,” and 15% opting for “not sure/Don’t remember?
Don’t remember?
But Leahy’s term has two years to run, Scott has shown no interest in running for national office, and Leahy may not run in 2022. He’ll be 82 years old. Senators of that age have been elected to the Senate, but not that often. Dianne Feinstein, D-Cailf., was reelected in 2018 at the age of 85. The oldest senator ever was Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who was still serving at the age of 102 in 2003.
Not a particularly appealing political model for Vermont. Leahy’s former colleague Daniel Inouye of Hawaii (a better model) was in his 80s when he ran for his last term. But he died in office at the age of 88.
Both because of his age and his reputation as a traditional, establishment Democrat, Leahy might be more vulnerable to a primary challenge from a young Democrat with a more “progressive” outlook (however that is defined these days) than from even the most popular Republican.
In light of the latest news from Washington that President Donald Trump was noncommittal about accepting “a peaceful transferral of power” should he lose the election, it may be worth noting that the poll indicates that only a small 54%-to-43% majority of Vermonters expressed confidence that this year’s presidential election will be “conducted fairly.”
But it may be noteworthy that a 56% majority of voters between 18 and 44 years old were either “not too confident’ or “not confident at all” that the election will be fair.
Younger people, of course, have always been more skeptical and more suspicious, so their opinions need not be taken seriously except, perhaps, in this case.
