Jon Margolis is a political columnist for VTDigger.
Does anybody care passionately who is governor of Vermont for the next two years?
Sure. The candidates, their immediate families, their campaign staffs, devoted partisans, and fervent ideologues have grave concerns about whether Republican Gov. Phil Scott is re-elected or is ousted by Progressive/Democratic challenger David Zuckerman.
That entire assemblage could probably fit into the grandstand at Centennial Field, the Vermont Lake Monsters home park, which seats 4,415 baseball fans or political junkies.
It isn’t that the rest of the state’s registered voters — some 495,603 of them — are completely unconcerned about whether Scott or Zuckerman gets elected. The Secretary of State’s Office expects more than 400,000 Vermonters to vote, and almost all of them will choose between the two candidates for governor.
But that’s not why they’re voting. Not this year. For some reasons peculiar to Vermont and two big reasons that are not, the 2020 election campaign completes the reversal of former House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s famous dictum that “all politics is local.” Now and for the foreseeable future, most politics is national.
The reasons peculiar to Vermont include few competitive statewide races, no reason to doubt that both houses of the Legislature will remain safely Democratic, and a general feeling that the state is in reasonably good hands under Gov. Phil Scott and would be in comparably good hands under Gov. David Zuckerman. This has been a civilized campaign between two men who both seem up to the job.
The two big reasons not peculiar to Vermont?
First, the Covid-19 pandemic, which even in Vermont has disrupted life as it was known before last March. The parents whose children are not in school every day, the unemployed watching their savings dribble away, the employed worried that they will get sick have more on their minds than state politics.
Second: Donald J. Trump.
Notice the wording. Not Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., even though it is Biden who will get a hefty majority of the vote in Vermont. But this election is no more about Biden than it is about Scott and Zuckerman.
This election is about Trump, who bestrides the political world as did Caesar “like a Colossus,” while his opponents “walk under his huge legs and peep about,” as Cassius describes it in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” Vermonters, most of them resolutely opposed to the president, may not like it, but this is the age of Donald Trump. Support and opposition to him define the political moment more than they have for any other recent president.
If the polls are even close to being accurate, that dominance could come crashing down next week. But for now, it is the focus of the political world, and by all indications the subject of far more political discussion – and political angst – in Vermont than any political contest in the state.
Not that anybody has taken a poll asking Vermonters what they talk about when they discuss politics. But Castleton University political science professor Rich Clark, who was head of the Castleton Polling Institute and directed the recent polling by VPR and Vermont PBS, noted that while 16% of Vermonters were undecided in the governor’s race, only 3% were undecided in this year’s presidential contest.
“This is an indirect measure,” Clark said, “but it seems that undecideds are indicative of a lack of interest in a race.”
The dominance of national over state and local politics has its disadvantages, Clark said, allowing “local leaders to operate under the radar with terrible outcomes for local issues.”
It also didn’t appear out of nowhere this year, Clark said. He noted that a recent book “The Increasingly United States” by political scientist Dan Hopkins (University of Chicago Press, 2018) argues that “American political behavior has become substantially more nationalized” over the last few decades.
So Donald Trump did not nationalize politics all by himself. Technology played its part. All-day, every-day cable news channels bring global events into every household, and now to every shirt pocket. Social media knows no local boundaries and has few standards or any mechanism to enforce those few.
But there seems little doubt that the Trump presidency has accentuated the nationalization of politics. By making his presidency about himself – his whims and his latest outbursts more than his policies – Trump has helped make the public discussion both more personal and more national than ever.
Especially here where state and local politics give the average person rather little to talk about, or even to argue about. The one public poll about state politics – the VPR/Vermont PBS poll – showed Scott with a huge lead over Zuckerman and indicated that the only competitive statewide race is the one between Democrat Molly Gray and Republican Scott Milne for lieutenant governor.
The lieutenant governor has almost no impact on the day-to-day lives of almost anyone. Almost everyone knows that.
Scott and Zuckerman are arguing over issues (Gray and Milne are just sniping at one another) but they are the same issues Vermont Democrats and Republicans have been arguing over for years: the minimum wage, family and medical leave, “affordability” (almost never defined), how to deal with global warming.
We’ve all heard these songs before.
Besides, even if that one poll was wrong (always possible; public opinion experts prefer looking at polling averages) and the race is closer, few Vermonters are likely to get into a tizzy about a possible Zuckerman governorship.
Or about close state Senate races in Rutland County and the Northeast Kingdom, or a handful of contests for the House, even the one that might oust House Speaker Mitzi Johnson, D- South Hero. With or without her, the House will remain solidly Democratic. So will the Senate.
The lights in many a house will burn late Tuesday night as Vermonters wait anxiously to see who won. But almost all that anxiety will be focused on one race. It’s not in Vermont.
