In the closing weeks of a campaign, candidates and other political actors are required to report mass media expenditures of $500 or more to the Secretary of State within 48 hours. This is designed to publicly expose any large-scale floods of money in a campaign’s closing days. Of course, this depends on somebody in the press paying attention to mass media filings, and so far nobody has. Well, nobody but Your Obedient Serpent.

The most interesting note from recent filings is that Gov. Phil Scott and his ticketmate, Republican LG nominee John Rodgers, filed a total of 17 separate mass media reports on a single day, Monday October 28. Fourteen of them reported major buys of radio ad time, all conducted jointly and with the expenses split evenly between the two campaigns. Two others reported a joint $4,390 TV buy carried out by the Vermont production firm Hen House Media. The 17th filing reported a $2,740 Scott-only TV buy through Hen House which, pardon the pun, is chicken feed for a gubernatorial campaign.

The other 14 reports add up to $36,855 spent on commercial radio. The big winner was VOX AM-FM, which sold an impressive $11,460 in Scott/Rodgers spots on its Burlington-area stations. The rest: $8,000 to the Radio Vermont Group (primarily WDEV), $6,000 to Rutland-based Catamount Radio (105.3 Cat Country, Z97.1 et al), $5,000 to Great Eastern Radio (Frank, Froggy, and the Penguin), $1,006 to Yankee Kingdom Media of Wells River, and $1,000 to Sugar River Radio.

A couple of notes. First, and it pains me to say this as a longtime radio voice, but the medium is dying. I’m old and I worked for decades in radio, and if I don’t listen anymore, then who does? (The only radio I regularly consume is content made available in podcast form.) So why are Scott and Rodgers going so big into radio for their big closing push? It’s a media strategy from a generation ago.

Second, why wait until now? All those ads are going to clutter the airwaves and severely test the patience of those who still listen. Why not start the ads a couple weeks ago?

Third, why is Scott making such an effort to boost Rodgers when the stakes are so much higher in the Legislature?

It’s the best possible development for Rodgers. His biggest chance of winning is to attach himself, leech-like, to Scott’s political underbelly, and it seems that Scott is a willing host. It’s something that Scott never did for LG candidates like Don Turner or Joe Benning. And why would he? I mean, the LG gets to hold the Senate’s gavel and sit on the Committee on Committees, which isn’t nothing, but Scott’s big goal is to eliminate (or reduce the potency of) the House and Senate supermajorities that have bedeviled him with veto overrides.

(Side note: My cynical side tells me the reason for this investment is hatred for the incumbent, Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman. Republicans can’t stand the guy. They think he’s a phony farmer and a phony Son of the Soil, and they relish the opportunity to eject him from public office and replace him with their own S.o.t.S.)

(Additional note: It’s been suggested that Scott may see Rodgers as a plausible successor when he decides to step away, rather than essentially leaving the governorship open to whichever Democrat wins that dogpile of a primary. It’s a good thought. And if true, it makes me wonder even more that Scott’s big push for Rodgers is $18,000 on radio spots and not something more comprehensive.)

On the legislative front, the Scott campaign made a couple of late buys on behalf of a few dozen legislative candidates, but not nearly on the scale of the Scott/Rodgers effort. Most recently, on October 22, Scott paid D.C.-based Battleground Strategies $5,500 to place online ads on behalf of 14 Republican candidates for House or Senate.

Curiously, much of the money went to relatively low-priority contests. The fortunate 14 included all three Republican incumbent senators from Rutland County plus Addison Republican hopeful Landel Cochran, none of whom have been getting money from the Barons of Burlington. The only Barons-backed candidate on Scott’s list of 14 was Addison’s Steven Heffernan — but if he benefited from one-fourteenth of a $5,500 ad buy (cash value $393), what the hell difference will that make?

Scott had made another Battleground digital ad buy of $10,600 on October 7, on behalf of 27 Republican candidates for House. Which again, each one of them got the equivalent of 1/27 of ten grand? (Coincidentally or not, that divides out to, um, $393.) This is the governor’s pavement-pounding, unprecedented all-out drive to get more Republicans in the Legislature?

As of October 15, the Scott campaign had more than a quarter million dollars in the bank. His closing expenditures are mere drops from that capacious bucket. A lousy $18K for Rodgers Radio and $16K for legislative candidates? I guess he’s counting on the intangible benefits of personal appearances, staged photo shoots, and fulsome quotes to make up for his cheapness.

(Not to mention that his team could have raised a lot more than that if they’d only tried, but Scott hates fundraising, so I guess that was a nonstarter.)

His actual challenger, as you might have guessed, is nowhere to be found. Democrat Esther Charlestin has made no mass media buys large enough to hit the $500 reporting threshold. Of course she hasn’t. As of October 15 she’d raised only $41,312 for her entire campaign (roughly 2% of Howard Dean’s estimated $2,000,000 cost of a successful challenge to Scott) and only had about $7,400 in the bank. That’s a shade more than the cost of designing, printing, and mailing postcards to a single Senate district. Why even bother?

So, Phil Scott saunters toward the finish line. And he’s apparently counting on the alleged tax revolt to brighten his outlook for a fifth term. Otherwise, he’ll be staring down the barrel of House and Senate supermajorities once again. Which, frankly, isn’t a good situation for any of us. Two more years of stalemate, hostility, and divided government with neither side able to comfortably implement a sweeping agenda or address any of our nettlesome problems? School funding, homelessness, housing, climate change, resiliency, opioids, corrections, our crumbling health care system, just to name a few? I mean, watching Phil Scott squirm under a flurry of overrides has its entertainment value, but it’s a hindrance to making Vermont a better place to live.