Phil Scott picks Kamala Harris for president

Updated at 6:25 p.m

BERLIN – Governor Phil Scott has cast his vote for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

After speaking out about his choice for president for weeks before Election Day, the Vermont Republican left his local polling station in Berlin shortly before 6 p.m. on Tuesday and told reporters that he had cast his vote for Harris.

“I did a little bit of thinking and thought about a lot of different things… and I came to the conclusion that I need to put country over party… and vote for Kamala Harris,” Scott said.

The governor said it was a decision that he did not make lightly or quickly. He said it was “not an easy thing to do as a sitting Republican governor, voting against your party’s nominee.”

Ultimately, however, Scott said his decision Tuesday was similar to the one he made in 2020 when he cast his vote for Democratic President Joe Biden. Over the past four years, Scott said Trump “hasn’t changed much” — in fact, “things have gotten worse, I think.”

“I know that from my perspective, Donald Trump has neither the ability nor the desire to unite our country,” he said. “Does Kamala Harris have that ability? I don’t know either, but I know she wants it and she’s going to try, and that’s half the battle.”

Scott made national headlines in 2020 when he became the only Republican governor in the country to publicly announce his vote for Biden. At the time, he told reporters: “It wasn’t enough for me not to vote. I had to vote against it.”

Next Tuesday he repeated his opinion from four years ago.

“I didn’t support Joe Biden four years ago, I voted for him,” Scott said. “This time I’m not supporting Kamala Harris. I vote for her. This is more of a vote against Donald Trump than for Kamala Harris.”

Scott has long been a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump, most recently telling VTDigger in a September interview that the leader of his Grand Old Party was “a manipulator, a fraud.” For months before Tuesday's election, Scott promised that he would not support Trump's third bid for the White House – a promise he only reiterated to reporters at the Statehouse in mid-October.

However, Scott remained tight-lipped about who he would vote for for the highest office in the land.

“I will not vote for former President Trump, but the question will be whether I vote for Vice President Harris. I think we still have a lot to learn about her,” the governor told reporters at a news conference on Sept. 12, just two days after Trump and Harris faced off in their first and only debate. “The debate was interesting. It was entertaining, but I don’t know if it really told us everything we need to know to understand their politics and what’s next.”

Scott further told reporters that when he cast his high-profile vote for Biden in 2020, he was more familiar with Biden than Harris in mid-September.

“I'll do the right thing when the time comes, but I don't know enough about her,” he said at the time.

For John Rodgers, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, Scott was the right candidate for president.

“I thought long and hard about it,” Rodgers said. “It’s really a protest.”

Rodgers said neither Trump nor Harris represent the moderates in the country. He said he wanted the opportunity to vote for someone more centrist, like Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, or former Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, now an independent from West Virginia.

Primaries and the partisanship they promote are “destroying our politics,” he said. “The left and right wings belong to the same bird,” he said.

Asked by reporters Tuesday when he made his decision, Scott said he spent a lot of time in the car the day before, which “gave me time to think.”

“The easier route for me would have been to just message someone, but I'm not built that way,” Scott said. “As I said four years ago, I thought it was the right thing to do: you have to put the country above the party.”