[S]teve Rowe wanted to make sure that voters didn’t forget about Gov. Phil Scott’s betrayal of gun rights supporters as elections approach, so he printed off 3,000 stickers of Vermont license plates with the letters “PHK PHIL” and asked local pubs and gun shops to start selling them.
“I just want the conversation to stay current. Here comes the election — the summer’s coming, and again I voted for Phil Scott, I believed in him,” Rowe, a commercial construction superintendent from Isle La Motte, said in a telephone interview this week.
“He stepped on our Green Mountain freedoms. I’d like to think come fall we can restore someone as the governor who will not let that happen,” Rowe said.
In the 2016 election, Scott promised to protect the rights of gun owners. But he had a change of heart after the February school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and shortly afterward announced he would approve new restrictions to the state’s gun laws.
Scott’s dramatic shift in stance on guns has angered and disappointed many supporters in his conservative base.
But whether a backlash from gun rights activists would impact his electoral popularity, on both sides of the political divide, has been an open question.
Until now. A new poll from the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont offers a glimpse into what Vermonters of all political persuasions think of the governor’s performance as the campaign season begins.
The most surprising takeaway for the first-term Republican governor? Scott has a lower favorability among Republicans than he does among Democrats, and the percentage of Republicans with a “very unfavorable” view of the governor is far higher than Democrats.
Independents or members of other parties, who account for about a third of the survey respondents, are within a few points of Democrats across the board. Democrats accounted for 39 percent of those surveyed, Republicans 20 percent and Progressives 6 percent.
Scott scored a 53 percent favorability rating among respondents who identified as Republicans, compared to 55 percent favorability among Democrats. That difference is within the survey’s margin of error, which is plus or minus 3.7 percent.
While more Republicans said they held a “very favorable” view of the governor than Democrats — 23 percent compared to 18 percent — there were higher negatives among Republicans as well: 26 percent had a “very unfavorable” view of Scott compared with 14 percent of Democrats.
Rowe, the former Scott supporter turned anti-Scott campaigner, said he thought he knew what was behind the data.
“A lot of Republicans were people that backed him, that campaigned for him because of Second Amendment issues,” he said. “That’s probably why you see the Republican numbers lower because he has insulted the majority of those.”
Brittney Wilson, Scott’s campaign spokesperson, warned that it would be a mistake to draw conclusions from the poll, which she said appeared to under-represent independents and amplify opinions of both ends of the spectrum, though she declined to give alternate data on the share of unaligned voters in the state.
Wilson also said that President Donald Trump’s favorability in the poll — a combined 31 percent — was almost unchanged since he was elected, which goes against conventional polling wisdom.
“As with any incumbent or administration you tend to see favorability decrease over the course of a term, and the fact that this shows no erosion whatsoever is highly unlikely,” she said of Trump’s numbers in the poll, which was conducted by Public Policy Polling for the ACLU.
Wilson said the governor’s decision to break his campaign promise not to pass any new gun regulations was based on “facts and figures and data” about what would make Vermonters safer.
“It’s important that elected officials have the opportunity to change their mind and make the right decision at the end of the day,” she said.
“He will always listen to folks,” Wilson said of Scott. “If there’s a certain issue that comes to his attention that the majority of Vermonters want something, he’s always going to take a listen and make the best decision based off of that.”
By listening to the majority of Vermonters on gun rights — polling has shown broad public support for the types of measures passed this session — Scott aligned himself at least briefly with his Democratic adversaries running the Statehouse, going as far as holding a signing ceremony on the Statehouse steps alongside the leaders of the Senate and House.
Could that translate to more votes and support among Democrats and liberal-leaning independents? Sen. Randy Brock, R-Franklin, a former Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, said he didn’t think so.
“Were it not for his stance on the gun issue, his favorables would be much, much higher overall, certainly on the Republican side. His favorability might not be as high on the other side but I don’t think it would be tremendously different,” he said.
“I think he lost more on the gun vote than he gained, but that’s just my opinion,” said Brock, who added that he personally disagrees with some of the governor’s positions on guns. The senator said that he still felt that Scott was in a strong position in his run for a second term.
“Right now, as I look at the field, everything is relative in terms of where Phil stands,” he said. “I don’t see him being in trouble at all.”
Troubles in the House
During his first term in office, the governor has relied heavily on members of his own party in the House to prevent Democrats from overriding his vetoes. With his second budget veto and 11th veto overall this session, he has tied former Gov. Howard Dean for the most vetoes ever in a single year.
But that dynamic could change drastically if Republican are unable to win more than 50 seats in the coming election. The party only managed to get 77 candidates registered by the official deadline for primaries, but could still add more candidates through write-ins or party placements.
That is significantly lower than in 2016, when Republicans got 103 candidates to register ahead of the deadline, said Don Turner, R-Milton and the current House minority leader. However, he said the party had similar numbers in 2014 and managed to increase its share of seats from 45 to 55.
“It doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to maintain our numbers and even pick up some, but it makes it more difficult when you don’t have numbers,” he said.
For the past three elections, Turner teamed up with fellow Reps. Brian Savage, R-Swanton, and Eileen Dickinson, R-St. Albans, to lead the recruitment drive for candidates. Turner said they had taken a back seat for this election and left more of the work to the Vermont Republican Party.
“We’ve done what we’ve been able to do but we haven’t had the effort we had in the last three cycles,” he said of the trio of representatives.
Jack Moulton, executive director of the state Republican Party, did not respond to an email requesting an interview for this article.
Party chair Deb Billado told a crowd of gun rights activists in April to channel their frustration about the new laws — and the governor — into activism and urged them to run for public office. Turner said it did not appear that the call for candidates was effective.
“I’m not sure why that didn’t work, but it’s not over yet. That’s what I’m going to work on,” he said. “There was a lot of emotion at that time, and people have now backed off of that, but if they had that kind of passion we need to figure out how to bring that back.”
Just getting gun rights supporters to turn out for public events protesting the new gun laws has been a struggle, said Jim Dattilio, the owner of Dattilio’s Guns & Tackle in South Burlington. While he was holding out hope that some sort of silent majority might vote Scott out of office, he wasn’t counting on it.
“Based on what we’re seeing for people showing up for the rallies we had, there’s a pretty good chance he’ll get re-elected,” Dattilio said, recalling a protest this winter in Kmart Plaza in South Burlington. “We couldn’t manage 200 to 300 people; what message is that sending to him?”
Dattilio said that most gun rights supporters worked for a living, and couldn’t take a day off to protest, let alone spend months in the Legislature. He added that a number of older, like-minded Vermonters were moving south to states with lower taxes upon retirement.
Although he has no plans of voting for Scott, he said there was no guarantee that the alternatives in a general election would be any better.
“Phil Scott in the long haul might be better than whoever is running, you don’t know,” he said.
