Updated at 6:25 p.m.
BERLIN — Gov. Phil Scott has cast his ballot for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
After keeping mum about his presidential pick for weeks leading up to Election Day, the Vermont Republican exited his local voting precinct in Berlin just before 6 p.m. on Tuesday and told reporters that he cast his ballot for Harris.
“I did some soul searching and thought about a lot of different things … and came to the conclusion that I had to put country over party … and vote for Kamala Harris,” Scott said.
It was a decision, the governor said, that he didn’t come to lightly or quickly. He said it’s “not an easy thing to do, being a Republican sitting governor and voting against your party’s nominee.”
But ultimately, Scott said his decision Tuesday was akin to that which he made in 2020, when he cast his ballot for Democratic President Joe Biden. In the past four years, Scott said that Trump “hasn’t changed much” — in fact, “things have gotten, I think, worse.”
“I know that Donald Trump, from my standpoint, doesn’t have the ability, nor the desire, to unite our country,” he said. “Does Kamala Harris have that ability? I don’t know either, but I do know she wants to, and she’ll try, and that’s half the battle.”
Scott made national headlines in 2020, when he was 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 to not vote. I had to vote against.”
Come Tuesday, he echoed his sentiment from four years ago.
“I didn’t endorse Joe Biden four years ago, I voted for him,” Scott said. “I’m not endorsing Kamala Harris this time. I’m voting for her. This is more of a vote against Donald Trump, than it is for Kamala Harris.”
Scott has long been a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump, most recently telling VTDigger in an interview in September that the leader of his Grand Old Party is “a manipulator, a con artist.” For months leading up to Tuesday’s election, Scott pledged that he would not support Trump’s third bid for the White House — a promise that he reaffirmed to Statehouse reporters as recently as mid-October.
READ MORE
As for whom he would cast his ballot to serve in the nation’s highest office, though, Scott remained tight-lipped.
“I will not be voting 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 press conference on Sept. 12, just two days after Trump and Harris faced one another 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 have an understanding of her policies and where she goes from here.”
Scott went on to tell reporters that when he cast his high-profile ballot for Biden in 2020, he was more familiar with Biden than he was of Harris by mid-September.
“I’ll do the right thing when it comes time, but I don’t know enough about her,” he said at the time.
For John Rodgers, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, the right thing was writing Scott in for president.
“I thought about it long and hard,” Rodgers said. “It’s really a protest.”
Rodgers said neither Trump nor Harris represents moderates in the country. He said he wanted the option to vote for someone more in the center, such as Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, or former Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, now an independent from West Virginia.
Primaries and the partisanship that they encourage are “destroying our politics,” he said. “The left and the right wing are part of the same bird,” he said.
Asked by reporters on Tuesday when he made up his mind, Scott said he spent a lot of time in the car the day prior, which “gave me time to think.”
“The easier route would have been for me just to write somebody in, but that’s not the way I’m built,” Scott said. “I thought the right thing to do, again, as I said four years ago: you have to put country over party.”
