Dora Levinson is an early childhood data and policy professional.
SAXTONS RIVER-What happened to the Phil Scott we knew? The governor who brought us through Covid together is not the Phil Scott on the ballot this year.
In the spring of 2020, when no one knew what the pandemic would bring next, Phil Scott stood at a podium twice a week with his health and education team and told us the truth. He asked Vermonters to be smart, stay safe, and be kind.
When his own party leadership pressured him to ease up on public health measures, he held the line. When some Vermonters pressed him to take a harder line against the unvaccinated, he refused, calling it “counterproductive.” He treated Vermonters, and our Legislature, as part of the same team.
I voted for that Phil Scott. Many of us did, more than once. That is not the governor on the ballot this fall.
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Jump forward four years. In April 2024, after weeks of hearings and historic levels of constituent input, the Vermont Senate voted 19 to 9 against confirming Zoie Saunders as education secretary. Three Democrats crossed over to vote for Scott’s choice; it was not a partisan stunt.
Within minutes, Scott named Saunders interim secretary, going around the rejection. The next day at his press conference, he called the Senate’s vote “a partisan political hit job.”
The governor who had once asked us to be kind in a crisis was now calling the considered judgment of our senators a hit job.
That was not a small shift in tone. It was the language of someone who no longer saw the Legislature as a co-equal branch, but had started seeing and positioning it as an enemy.
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That summer and fall, Scott did something he had not done at this scale before: He campaigned hard. Not for himself, but against members of his own Legislature. He hit the trail for Republican Senate candidates in five competitive races, hammering Democrats on the clean heat standard and property taxes.
And it worked. Republicans flipped six Senate seats, breaking the supermajority.
On election night, Scott framed the win this way: “Can you [...] afford to live and thrive in Vermont, if we don’t make a course correction on the path set by legislative leaders over the last two years?” Vermonters are the “we” in that sentence. We made the team. The legislative leaders did not.
By 2025, this had become the norm. Scott was routinely going around bodies that disagreed with him.
He released his own sweeping education plan in January, bypassing the Commission on the Future of Public Education that the Legislature had created the year before (and which he had unsuccessfully vetoed).
Then, last November, when the School District Redistricting Task Force voted 8-3 to recommend voluntary mergers instead of forced consolidation maps, Scott said the Task Force had “failed.” He went on to say that members who “didn’t fulfill their obligation are okay with the ever-increasing property taxes.”
These were volunteer Vermonters who had spent four months reviewing the data and weighing what consolidation would mean for Vermont communities, including a former state college president Scott himself had appointed. He was accusing them of not caring about their neighbors’ tax bills.
Then this past January, Scott devoted his entire State of the State address to a single topic, the first governor to do so since Shumlin in 2014. The message: “I will not sign a budget or an education bill or a tax bill that deviates from Act 73 or fails to fix what’s broken.”
Vermont Public, not a partisan critic but our public radio, reported it plainly: Scott “has taken the state budget hostage.”
For five months he held that position, through repeated press warnings of a government shutdown that would have furloughed state workers and frozen services Vermonters depend on. While Scott and the Legislature were locked in his fight over maps and mergers, Vermont’s housing shortage deepened, federal Medicaid cuts pressured our healthcare system, and the motel voucher program continued to evict Vermonters into homelessness. He finally yielded on forced school district mergers in late May, just days before he filed for re-election.
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What stays with me is this.
The governor who once stood with our Legislature now campaigns against it.
The governor who once treated the people doing the slow work of policy — the commissioners, the senators, the teachers — as partners now treats them as scapegoats and obstacles.
The governor who once asked us to be kind now uses must-pass legislation as leverage and the language of “hit jobs” to publicly discredit the people we send to Montpelier.
Vermont continues to face real problems. Housing. A workforce that is aging while young Vermonters can’t afford to stay. Children who aren’t thriving.
The current approach of ultimatums has not moved the needle. We need a different approach, one that brings Vermonters together and does the slow, hard work of building good policy.
Vermont deserves better, and this year we have real options.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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