Last week, after the polling firm Morning Consult declared Gov. Phil Scott “America’s Most Popular Governor,” Jason Maulucci, his press secretary, proudly tweeted about his boss’s first-place showing.
He also added a rejoinder to those who have called on Scott to do more about Covid-19 in the wake of the Delta variant: “Vermonters continue to support steady, strong leadership and want to keep moving forward, not backward. #vtpoli #TwitterIsNotRealLife.”
Maulucci’s tweet came on the same day that Vermont marked its 400th death from Covid-19, and a brief social media pile-on ensued. But the gubernatorial spokesman had indeed hit upon an inconvenient truth for the governor’s critics, including top Democrats in the Legislature.
All indications suggest that Scott remains wildly popular. And despite the “R” next to his name, it is self-identified Democrats, not Republicans, who support him at the highest rate.
A 50-state monthly survey conducted by researchers at Harvard, Rutgers, Northwestern and Northeastern echoed this. In September, 69% of those surveyed said they approved of Scott’s handling of Covid. A University of New Hampshire survey of 1,500 Vermonters taken between Nov. 15 and Nov. 22, meanwhile, reflected, again, a 69% percent approval rating. Democrats in the UNH poll gave Scott the highest marks: 77% said they approved of his pandemic response.
There are signs Delta is chipping away at the goodwill Scott has accumulated in the last year and a half. A UNH poll from this April showed Scott had an overall approval rating of 75%. At that time, a staggering 90% of Democrats said they approved of his handling of Covid-19.
Rich Clark, a pollster and political science professor at Castleton University, cautions that consistent polling data in Vermont is still scant. But what we have tells a consistent story: Vermonters, by and large, apparently give their governor high marks. And if their support of Scott is slipping, he still has quite a bit of room to maneuver.
“Those are still amazing approval ratings,” Clark said.
Scott’s polling performance, compared with his peers, likely reflects in large part Vermont’s experience of the pandemic contrasted with the rest of the country. The state is home to the country’s most vaccinated population, and even during the latest surge, its hospitalization and death rates have been among the lowest in the nation.
But despite the state’s comparative success, Delta continues to badly strain Vermont’s schools and health systems. Schools report being too overwhelmed to conduct testing, the Health Department has stopped conducting contact tracing except for what officials consider “high risk” Vermonters, and hospitals say ICU capacity could max out.
Immunization has dramatically lessened the risk of severe illness and death, but record-breaking case numbers have nevertheless translated into a high number of hospitalizations and fatalities, particularly — but not exclusively — among the unvaccinated.
The second- and third-deadliest months of the pandemic were reported during the Delta surge, and on Tuesday the Vermont Department of Health reported 68 people were currently hospitalized for Covid-19 — a new pandemic high.
Heading into Thanksgiving, administration officials expanded testing capacity and urged Vermonters to check their status before and after gatherings, particularly if they are seeing vulnerable relatives, and to get their booster shots. But heading into the holiday this week, Scott acknowledged that things were likely to get worse.
“I want to be honest with you: as a result of Thanksgiving, we will probably see a higher number of cases next week and the week after. So we’re asking you to help us keep that spike as low as we can,” Scott said Tuesday during his weekly press conference.
But if Scott is not yet out of step with Vermont’s liberal electorate, he is also basically in line with the talking points of a Democratic White House. He is often heard saying that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” and that Vermonters must lean on personal responsibility to navigate the virus. In doing so, he is directly quoting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky.
“The White House is not only not leading us in controlling (the pandemic), they’re leading us in not implementing policies that would control it, which is really remarkable to me,” said Julia Raifman, a Boston University public health professor who has called for states to adopt mask mandates tied to levels of transmission.
The governor’s team insists that Scott does not govern based on what he believes is popular. Quite the opposite: Vermont’s top executive usually gets annoyed when aides try to show him polling data, Maulucci said. (“He is not going to be happy with me for this article,” he added somewhat ruefully.) But Scott has nevertheless pointed to his sense of the public’s will when defending his decision not to reinstate things like a statewide mask mandate.
“We’re just not seeing it; not hearing it,” he told a reporter in late October when pressed about his claim that the public had little appetite for such measures.
The line so incensed Alexis Dubief, an Essex resident and parenting book author, that she filed a public records request for the two most recent months of call logs and emails to the governor’s constituent services. The people she knew were calling the governor, she thought, so why was he claiming not to be hearing from them?
Dubief received PDF documents hundreds of pages long and spent hours, along with her husband Yves Dubief — a University of Vermont professor and Covid researcher in the area of aerosol dispersion — painstakingly tallying the results. They found that roughly 90% of the more than 300 calls and emails that came into his office on the subject of Covid-19 called for stronger mitigation measures, including mask mandates.
But those Vermonters calling up the governor are a self-selecting sample, Maulucci counters, and aren’t necessarily representative of the public at large. “People don’t often call up the office to say ‘I just want to let you know you’re doing a hell of a job,’ ” he said. Overall call volume also appears to be down from earlier in the pandemic, he added.
Dubief grants that she’s probably in the minority. But then again, she said, Scott, who earlier in the crisis won bipartisan — and national — plaudits for his handling of the virus, has been standing at a podium, week in and week out, reassuring Vermonters that there is not much cause for concern.
“People just want to believe it’s fine,” she said. “And he told everybody: ‘It’s fine.’ And I think that’s why he’s so resistant to doing anything. Because that would mean that maybe things weren’t fine.”
