By James J. Devine
Let us begin with a thought experiment.
Suppose you were a Republican strategist — a real one, not the kind who appears on cable news in a fleece vest to explain why losing is actually winning — and you were tasked with designing the ideal 2028 presidential candidate from scratch. You would want someone with executive experience.
Longevity in office is proof of broad appeal. Someone who wins not just once in a fluke but repeatedly, and by expanding margins, in a state that votes the other way by double digits. You would want someone with a credible record on fiscal restraint who nonetheless didn’t frighten off moderates. Someone pro-choice, pro-environment, and pro-gun-reform who still gets three-quarters of the vote in a general election. Someone who, when the republic was under strain, said clearly and on the record that it was under strain.
If you ran those specifications through a candidate-generating machine, it would spit out Phil Scott of Vermont.
And that is precisely why Phil Scott will never be the Republican presidential nominee.
Scott has won five consecutive gubernatorial elections in the most Democratic state in the country by the Cook Partisan Voting Index — D+17, bluer than California, bluer than Massachusetts, bluer than your college professor’s NPR tote bag.
His 2024 margin of victory was the largest in any Vermont gubernatorial race since 1946. He has done this not by pretending to be a Democrat, not by hiding his party affiliation in small print, but by being a recognizably human politician who does recognizably sensible things.
He signed gun control legislation. He protected abortion rights with a constitutional amendment. He joined the U.S. Climate Alliance. He declined to deploy his National Guard to Washington when asked to by an administration he considered to be engaged in unconstitutional theater. He voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024, and he said so out loud, like a man who is not afraid of his own voters.
This is, of course, political suicide in the modern Republican Party.
The very qualities that make Scott an almost comically strong general-election candidate — the crossover appeal, the independence, the willingness to say “this is wrong” when something is wrong — are the precise qualities that have become disqualifying in GOP primary politics.
The Republican base does not want someone who wins 74 percent of the vote. The base wants someone who makes the right enemies.
Consider what Scott represents as a political specimen. He is a stock car racer who became a construction company co-owner who became a state senator who became lieutenant governor who became governor.
He is, in the old sense of the phrase, a self-made man from a small state who earned his credibility incrementally and maintained it by not doing obviously stupid things.
He calls himself “fiscally conservative but socially liberal,” which is, it should be noted, what roughly 40 percent of Americans actually are, and what almost no one in national Republican politics is allowed to be anymore without being denounced as a RINO, a globalist, or whatever the current term of art is for “person with legible principles.”
As of 2025, he is the second-longest serving incumbent governor in the United States. He has called Trump’s National Guard deployments unconstitutional. He has said Trump should have resigned after January 6th.
He is, by every empirical measure, the kind of Republican who could actually win a national election — which is to say, the kind of Republican who has precisely zero chance of surviving a Republican primary.
The math is not complicated. A candidate who wins 73 percent of Vermont is not doing so by motivating a base; he is doing so by not repelling people.
The modern Republican primary system is not designed to select for the candidate who does not repel people. It is designed to select for the candidate who most energetically repels half of the people who comprise the United States of America.
Phil Scott has spent his career not repelling people. This makes him, in current GOP terms, approximately as electable as a man who arrives at CPAC wearing a mask.
And here is the quietly devastating irony: the Republican Party, which styles itself as the party of competence, pragmatism, and common sense, has constructed a nomination process that would discard its most competent, pragmatic, common-sense candidate without a second glance.
Scott could win Michigan. He could win Wisconsin. He could probably win Pennsylvania.
He could, if the conditions were right, win a national election in a way that hasn’t happened cleanly for a Republican in a very long time. Instead, the Republican Party will spend the next several years auditioning candidates who excel at the one skill Scott conspicuously lacks: the ability to make a large number of people very angry in a satisfying way.
Phil Scott is, in the truest sense, a sane man in an insane party. The Republican Party would be absolutely, demonstrably crazy not to nominate him.
It must be acknowledged, however, that the Republican Party does appear to be absolutely, demonstrably crazy.
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