Democrats control the state legislature and every other statewide office, but the praise they lavish on Scott’s leadership is unreserved and foreign to the zero-sum brutality of modern politics. “He’s done an absolutely tremendous job on COVID,” Representative Peter Welch, Vermont’s lone member of Congress, told me. Indeed, Democrats have struggled to beat Scott in part because they can’t seem to find a bad thing to say about him. “He is a rational, thoughtful, and caring Republican,” says former Lieutenant Governor David Zuckerman, the Democrat whom Scott clobbered last year. How is it possible that a state that sends Bernie Sanders to the Senate every six years has become so enamored with its Republican governor? Scott’s popularity is unusual but not an anomaly: Vermont is now most closely associated politically with environmentalists and the progressivism of Sanders, but before the 1960s, it went more than a century without electing a Democratic governor. Since then, it has essentially alternated between the two parties every few years. Because Sanders runs as an independent, Patrick Leahy remains the only Democrat whom Vermont voters have ever elected to the Senate... I asked Scott why he hadn’t become an independent. “That would probably be the easier path, to be quite honest with you,” he said. “But if you look at the longevity of the Republican Party, there’s a lot to be proud of, from my perspective.” He listed Baker, Hogan, Representative Liz Cheney, and Senator Mitt Romney as leaders that give the party hope, and suggested that to abandon the GOP over Trump would be akin to surrendering the party to him. “We’ll see what happens in the future,” Scott said. “But I have no intention of leaving the Republican Party.”