There are just two Republican governors, as it stands, who serve alongside a state legislature controlled by Democrats. One of them, Gov. Joe Lombardo of Nevada, was ousted Tuesday night amid a “blue tsunami” of Democratic gains across the country.

But the other, Vermont’s GOP Gov. Phil Scott, defied the national trends — again.

Scott overcame a well-funded challenge from Amanda Janoo, a Democrat who also had the backing of the Vermont Progressive Party, to win 52.6% of the vote to Janoo’s 45.6%, according to The Associated Press. He is now set to serve a sixth two-year term, something no other governor has done in the modern history of the state.

At the same time, Scott’s six-point margin of victory is the narrowest of any race he’s run for governor. His push to get more Republican lawmakers elected down the ballot this year could hardly have fallen flatter: Democrats flipped enough GOP seats in the state House and Senate to regain the supermajorities they enjoyed several years ago. And his choice for lieutenant governor, the Republican incumbent John Rodgers, was ousted by a whopping 25 points by a Democrat, former Lt. Gov. Molly Gray.

So, how did Scott do so well Tuesday while so many others in his party faltered?

‘A category of one’

Tuesday’s election proved that while voters were eager to reject Republicans in an election widely viewed as a referendum on President Donald Trump, many Vermonters don’t see Scott in Trump’s light. There is little doubt that Trump’s unpopularity gave Janoo a boost in a year when Democratic voters were eager for change. But “people don’t regard Phil Scott as a Republican” all that much, said Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central.

“It’s like they have a separate category in their mind of the Scott Republican,” Baruth, who did not run for reelection this year, said Wednesday. He described that brand as moderate on wedge issues like gun control but critical of Trump’s foreign policy.

“I just think he’s created a category of one, you know? And Democrats are willing to pull the lever for him even as they vote blue across the ballot,” Baruth said.

Of all the state Senate districts — which roughly correspond to county boundaries — Scott performed best in Franklin County, where he won about 68% of the vote, according to a VTDigger analysis of unofficial results. At the same time, Democrats flipped a number of GOP-held Vermont House seats there, results show.

Statewide, Janoo scored about 141,000 total votes. That’s about 50,000 fewer than Gray, the Democratic lieutenant governor-elect, and 57,000 fewer than U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., who also won her race Tuesday, noted Chris Graff, a longtime and former Vermont political journalist for the AP.

“So there was a conscious decision on the part of people who were voting for Democratic candidates up and down the line not to vote for Amanda,” Graff said.

Scott made a point this fall that he has been talking about affordability — the central issue of this year’s campaign, in Vermont and around the country — for far longer than most other candidates. Janoo argued Scott’s plans for addressing affordability, namely cutting taxes and state regulations, would not help. But even if voters agreed with her, they might not have blamed Scott for their cost of living woes, which are more easily assigned to factors outside the state’s control, such as the war in Iran.

Voters appeared to reward Scott’s leadership on state-level issues above all else, said Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck, R-Caledonia, in a statement Wednesday.

“Governor Scott’s victory reflects a clear message from voters: Vermonters want practical leadership focused on solving problems, not partisan politics,” Beck said. “Throughout his tenure, Governor Scott has consistently demonstrated an ability to bring people together, manage taxpayer dollars responsibly, and keep Vermont moving forward during challenging times.”

Incumbency vs. inexperience

It was always going to be an uphill battle for any Democrat to unseat Scott, who has long polled as the most popular governor in the country. That was certainly the case for Janoo, an economist who had never run a political campaign before and had no name recognition at the start of the year.

Only twice in Vermont’s history has an incumbent governor lost a bid for reelection, with the most recent case in 1962. And of Vermont’s 22 governors who served over the past century, all but two were previously lieutenant governor or in the state Legislature, according to Graff. Scott served in the Senate and as lieutenant governor. Some voters, Graff said, may have liked Janoo’s ideas but questioned her ability to implement them.

At the same time, Janoo’s lack of specificity on how some of her proposals would be funded — possibly a result of running for office the first time — left her open to political attacks, said Matt Dickinson, a political science professor at Middlebury College. Janoo ran on raising taxes on high-income earners and luxury second homes to pay for free primary healthcare and other public services. But when pressed, she said that many details of her proposals would need to be fleshed out after she was elected.

That proved to be an easy target for Scott, Dickinson said, who has spent years building his political brand around not raising taxes. The governor may well have clinched the race, Dickinson said, in his closing statement of the last debate of the campaign on WCAX last week, when he characterized Janoo’s platform as “free this, free that.”

“When we hear about hundreds of millions of dollars in new promises, you need to ask yourself, ‘Who’s going to pay for that?’” Scott said. “Spoiler alert, I’ve seen this movie before. And the answer is: You do.”

That was one of the few times during a civil and respectful campaign that Scott attacked Janoo directly, Dickinson noted. At the same time, though, Scott also benefited from an outside group — a political action committee — taking aim at Janoo on his behalf.

The Republican Governors Association poured $950,000 into a pro-Scott super PAC, which is legally barred from coordinating with Scott’s campaign, in the final weeks of the race. The PAC ran ads questioning Janoo’s experience and even quoting her opponent in the Democratic primary, Aly Richards, seeming to criticize her ideas as unrealistic.

Scott told reporters last month that he would have preferred no outside spending in the race on his behalf. But the reality was that “somebody was doing his dirty work for him,” Dickinson said.

The value of the outside spending “wasn’t the money itself. It was the ability to go negative in a way that effectively raised concerns about how, A, Janoo could pay for this, and B, whether Janoo was prepared to be governor,” Dickinson said.

The outside spending also helped counter the fact Janoo raised more money than Scott over the last two months of the race. Over the full campaign, Janoo raised just over $1 million, which is more than any Scott challenger since the governor’s first bid for the office in 2016. Scott, by comparison, raised just shy of $720,000 by Election Day.

A disparate map

Janoo won the Democratic primary in part by running up large vote totals in the state’s population center, Chittenden County.

Tuesday, she outperformed her primary margin of victory in the county’s deep-blue heart of Burlington and Winooski. But she couldn’t score enough votes in surrounding suburbs — Shelburne, Williston, Colchester — to overcome Scott’s support there. Those so-called “ring towns” tend to be communities that match Scott’s politics well, said Baruth, the Senate president: socially liberal but more fiscally conservative.

Janoo did well in some other blue pockets of the state, including the areas around Brattleboro and Montpelier. But she couldn’t replicate the same success in a broader pattern of communities that gave her the win in August, according to Graff.

“Phil picked up support sort of here and there, but all across the state,” he said. “He just never stopped getting votes.”

With Democrats doing so well in downballot races in many of those same communities, how far the governor’s support will take him once the Legislature resumes its work in January remains to be seen, Dickinson said. Scott has routinely cast blame on the Democratic supermajority that was in place several years ago for some of the state’s current woes, including affordability concerns.

“His support dropped, you know, 20 percentage points or more depending on where you were,” Dickinson said. “Some Vermont voters said, ‘Yeah, you’ve been talking about affordability all the time. But things still aren’t affordable, so maybe we should look the other way.’”

Baruth said he thinks there is a limit on Scott’s power for the next two years while an unpopular Republican is still president.

“I don’t know that it’s possible so quickly to gin up the boogeyman of the supermajority again when you’ve still got Trump in the White House,” Baruth said. “Everybody now sees that Donald Trump was crazy, is crazy and will be crazy.”

This story was first published by VTDigger and is republished with permission as part of the Vermont Journalism Trust’s Community News Sharing Project.