[J]ust as only the Shadow (maybe) knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men (or, for that matter, women), no one can know for certain just what bedevils another person’s serenity.
But sometimes you can make a pretty good guess, and it isn’t hard to figure out what may be keeping Lt. Gov. Phil Scott awake at night and haunting his dreams when he finally gets to sleep: Donald Trump.
That’s because Scott is likely to be the Republican candidate for governor this fall, when Trump could well be his party’s candidate for president.
In this state, Trump versus either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders does not look like a close call. True, nobody knows what will happen in the future, but there are some guidelines. The last two Republican presidential candidates got just over 30 percent of the statewide vote, and both John McCain and Mitt Romney were — at least by the conventional measurements — far more palatable to the typical Vermonter than Trump appears to be.
Needless to say, the conventional measurements might be as obsolete here as they seem to be elsewhere. If not, Republicans could be looking at a top of their ticket that gets not much more than a quarter of the vote.
That’s a big hill to have to climb. Coattails are not what they were decades ago when a less informed, more party-oriented electorate was more likely to vote a straight ticket.
Still, if almost three-quarters of the voters come to the polls in a Democratic mood on Nov. 8, prepared to support Clinton or Sanders, and then overwhelmingly re-elect Rep. Peter Welch, it will take an energetic and creative campaign to get enough of them to switch to a Republican candidate for governor.
Perhaps the first step in that campaign occurred last week when Scott and 28 Republican state legislators endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida for the Republican nomination.
It isn’t that Rubio is such a great fit for Vermont, or even Vermont Republicans, many of whom (including Scott) think a woman should have the right to an abortion. Rubio thinks she should not have that right even if she is pregnant because she was raped.
But for Vermont Republican leaders, Rubio has one invaluable asset: He is not Donald Trump. In their view, Trump is not Vermont’s kind of Republican.
Oh? Then why is he way ahead in the only poll about Tuesday’s Vermont Republican primary?
A poll taken in early February by the Castleton Polling Institute for Vermont Public Radio found Trump with 32.4 percent of the vote. Rubio was second at 16.9 percent.
A few caveats. Only 20 percent of the 895 respondents said they planned to vote in the Republican primary, so the margin of error in that finding is 9.01 percentage points. And when the survey was taken, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie were still in the race. Together, they drew 10 percent of the GOP respondents, many of whom might end up supporting Rubio (even though Christie endorsed Trump on Friday).
Still, that’s a big lead in a reliable poll. No one should be surprised if Trump wins Tuesday. Maybe he’s closer to being Vermont’s kind of Republican than the party leadership wants to think.
And while that 20 percent of the sample planning to vote in the GOP primary is low, it’s just about the same as the percentage of primary voters who took Republican ballots in 2008, the last time both parties had competitive presidential primaries here.
That hardly bodes well for Republican hopes in November. But it may indicate that the party is in no worse shape than it was in 2008 or 2012.
The poll also measured how voters viewed the candidates for governor. The results were somewhere between meaningless and inconclusive.
Scott was way ahead of his Republican primary opponent, retired Wall Street executive Bruce Lisman, by a margin of 42 percent to 4 percent. Lisman, of course, is not nearly as well-known, a weakness that can be remedied. His effort to remedy it — a television advertising campaign — has just begun.
Scott is also the choice of two-thirds of all those who said they had decided which candidate to support in the general election. But only a third of the respondents had made that decision. Two-thirds of one-third is 22 percent.
As for the two Democrats now in the race — former legislator Matt Dunne and former Transportation Secretary Sue Minter — they barely register above the blip level, with 19 percent for Dunne, 11 percent for Minter and 51 percent undecided.
This, too, appears to be largely a function of name recognition (or lack thereof) and predicts nothing. It might, though, offer encouragement to former state Sen. Peter Galbraith and former Rep. John Moran, both of whom are thinking about running for the nomination.
Whether these results justify considering Scott the front-runner is open to interpretation. He certainly starts off as the early favorite for the Republican nomination, and considering the political weakness of the incumbent Democratic administration, a popular Republican candidate should be a strong contender in November.
But the poll showed signs that the antipathy toward Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin has peaked and perhaps started to ebb. Shumlin’s approval rating is still in the negative, at 37 percent to 40 percent. But the disapproval number has gone down slightly (as has the approval rating), while the “not sure/no opinion” percentage rose.
Meanwhile, another poll, this one taken by the Gallup polling firm measuring trust in state government, found that by a margin of 60 percent to 39 percent, Vermonters have “trust and confidence” in their state government “when it comes to handling problems.” That was the 19th highest score in the country.
The data would indicate, then, that merely being “the anti-Shumlin” is not likely to be enough to elect the Republican candidate. That candidate is going to have to offer a compelling case for himself, especially if Donald Trump is at the head of his ticket.
