With less than two weeks before Election Day, Gov. Phil Scott and Amanda Janoo went head-to-head for the first time Wednesday evening in a televised debate hosted by Vermont Public. The two candidates vying for Vermont’s top job have vastly different prescriptions for what ails Vermont, and the Republican incumbent and his Democratic/Progressive rival drew sharp contrasts for voters on the subjects of education, healthcare and taxes most of all.
Long hailed as the most popular governor in America, Scott is seeking a sixth two-year term as Vermont’s chief executive. But he is facing sagging approval ratings and an unexpectedly formidable challenge from Janoo, an economist and political newcomer who has tapped into a progressive energy propelling outsiders to victory — in Democratic primaries, at least — across the country.
Despite the competitive nature of the race, their exchange was remarkably friendly. Asked to name someone they respected from another party, Janoo even said Scott.
“First of all, he's just super nice,” she said, adding that she’d appreciated he hadn’t “followed along with the Republican sort of like Trump MAGA fascist regime.”
A socially liberal Republican, Scott’s opposition to new taxes and fees has always been at the core of his political identity. Vermont, he believes, needs more taxpayers, not more taxes. He and Janoo’s fundamental disagreement on this point colored their responses to questions about everything from education to healthcare.
Janoo has made free, universal primary and preventative care a cornerstone of her campaign, and she’s said she believes income tax surcharges on those making over $250,000 could cover the cost.
The candidate didn’t directly answer a question from Vermont Public moderator Mikeala Lefrak about whether she’d ditch the idea if its actual price tag required taxes on those in lower income brackets. But she suggested she was also interested in experimenting on a smaller scale.
“In Tunbridge, for example, their community nurse is just a municipal employee, and that ensures that everybody has some sort of local healthcare. And I love that model, right?” she said, adding Vermont could “start with pilots.”
Scott called Janoo’s universal primary care plan into question, rattling off statistics about the number of filers there were in each of Vermont’s tax brackets.
“My point is, we don't have that many rich people in Vermont, and I'm not sure how many we want to lose over the next few years,” he said. “One person makes a billion dollars, and when that's gone, that's gone.”
Vermont, he said, would be better off exploring more modest, market-based reforms, including by allowing insurers to adjust premiums based on age.
“Let them debate on the national stage as to whether we go to ‘Medicare for All’ as Sen. Sanders has been advocating for,” he said.
The candidates also couldn’t disagree more on education. Asked by Lefrak what the Legislature spends too much time on, Janoo didn’t skip a beat: “school consolidation.”
And she argued that what schools need is additional investments in the form of wrap-around services, and that placing such programs in schools could actually create new revenue streams.
Scott, on the other hand, referenced his desire to follow through on education reform, and his project to right-size the state’s pre-K-12 system in the face of declining enrollment, as a key reason he had decided to run again.
School spending has grown by nearly a billion dollars over the last 10 years, he said, and was crowding out other parts of the state budget. Meanwhile, one high school in Washington County had 139 kids in its senior class — and 85 in kindergarten.
“That tells you everything you have to know about what's going to happen in 10 years,” Scott said. “You know, so we have to fix the system. It's the system itself that is just absorbing, sucking all the life out of us, and not getting to the kids.”
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Scott and Janoo also disagreed on nuclear power. The governor said the state shouldn’t close the door to nuclear energy, and that he would consider siting a “small-scale” plant in Vermont.
“All the New England governors are talking about it now, and this is mostly Democrats,” he said.
But Janoo said she wasn’t interested, and said much of the momentum toward nuclear energy “has been coming alongside the push for data centers.”
Janoo did at one point obliquely tie Scott to the national Republican brand. Given the opportunity to query the other candidate, she asked him about the advertising blitz that the Republican Governors Association had been bankrolling to attack her.
The RGA’s funders, she said, included Elon Musk, the Koch brothers, “pharma and tech companies.”
“I know that you've talked about how you don't appreciate this kind of negative campaigning, and so I want to see if you would join me in really, like, condemning this type of outside spending,” she said.
Scott replied that, given campaign finance laws, he had no control over how the RGA spent its money. And he complained that he was on the other end of outside spending, too.
“I'm not sure that they are attacking you like VPIRG is attacking me, but at the same time I don't think it's necessary,” he said.
If Scott is elected again and serves his full term, he’ll have spent more time as governor than anyone else in state history. Asked, in the lightning round, if they believed governors should be subject to term limits, both replied the same way: yes.
The election is Nov. 3, although early voting is underway.
