BERLIN, Vt. (AP) — Vermont Democratic U.S. Rep. Peter Welch was reelected Tuesday to the post he has won every two years since 2006.

During his seven terms in the House, the 73-year-old Welch has consistently been one of Vermont’s top statewide vote-getters.

Before the election, Welch, Vermont’s at-large member of Congress, said he felt his popularity has been due to his continued focus on the state’s needs.

He says the country is facing the “extraordinary challenges” of the coronavirus pandemic and what Welch has described as President Donald Trump’s threat to democracy. Welch defeated Republican Miriam Berry, a registered nurse from Essex Junction who was making her first run for public office.

Berry had described herself as a conservative who is for civil rights and cutting waste from the budget.

Before the polls opened Tuesday, more than 80% of the number of Vermonters who voted in the 2016 presidential election had already cast their ballots.

The large number of early voters was due, in part, to a change in voting procedures designed to make it safer to cast ballots during the pandemic. The race between Republican President Donald Trump and Biden also helped drive turnout this year.

Biden won Vermont's three electoral votes. In addition to the major party candidates, there were 19 other presidential candidates on the Vermont ballot. Trump had not visited the state to campaign since being elected.

Vermont's Republican Gov. Phil Scott said Tuesday be cast his presidential ballot for Biden, the first time in his life he has voted for a Democratic presidential candidate.

“As many of you knew, I didn’t support President Trump. I wasn’t going to vote for him,” Scott said outside his polling location. “But then I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t enough for me to just not vote. I had to vote against. So again it’s — I put country over party, which again wasn’t an easy thing to do in some respects.”

Later Tuesday, Scott told The Associated Press what pushed him over the edge into voting for Biden was the public treatment of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert. Trump has often lashed out at Fauci. On Monday the president suggested he would fire Fauci after the election.

“It’s just the public badgering of Dr. Fauci that was really bothersome,” Scott said Tuesday before his race was called. “Here is someone who is apolitical, you know, just trying to do his job and he was just, I don’t know, it was just beyond the pale from my perspective.”

Scott is facing Democratic Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman in his bid for reelection.

The Vermont polls closed at 7 p.m.

On Tuesday morning in Montpelier, where early season snow was falling and the temperature hovered around 28 degrees F (minus 2.2 C), more than a half-dozen voters were waiting to vote outside City Hall, wearing masks and physically distancing on the stairs leading up to the polling station.

Sean Miller, 30, a carpenter and metal fabricator, voted later in the morning, saying he felt strongly about the election.

Whether Trump or Biden won, he said, “there’s going to be like a lot of unrest and people crying foul.”

In the small town of Plainfield, Daniel Hardy, 62, who is semiretired, said he’s been more politically engaged than in past elections. That’s meant “being more passionate and vocal about the election and what it means, and the direction our country is going in,” he said as he was about to vote at the historic Plainfield Town Hall Opera House, originally a church.

Welch, traditionally one of the most liberal members of Congress, was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He went to law school at the University of California, Berkeley.

He settled in Vermont in the 1970s, first working as a public defender before founding a law office. He was first elected to the state Senate in 1980 but took a break from electoral politics in the 1990s.

Welch was reelected to the state Senate in 2002 before being elected to the U.S. House in 2006 — the year now-U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who held the House seat before Welch, ran for the U.S. Senate for the first time.

He has said his goal in serving in Congress is to bring “the Vermont way” to the body, which means working across the aisle with Republicans and seeking common ground on the issues facing Vermont and the nation.

Berry, a supporter of President Donald Trump, has worked as a nurse for more than 25 years. She won the Republican primary, defeating three other little-known candidates. She pitched herself as someone who is not a career politician and knows what it’s like to worry about paying the bills.

The state GOP has not fielded or backed a serious candidate to run against Welch in years.

Scott, 61, a former construction executive from Berlin — and a Republican in a heavily Democratic state — is seen as popular with the public and has been given high marks for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Zuckerman, 48, a Hinesburg farmer, campaigned on promises to do more to advance progressive causes, saying wealthy people should pay more in taxes and Vermont should do more to combat climate change.

Vermont and New Hampshire remain the only states with two-year terms for the governor.

Voters also cast ballots for the state’s other statewide elected offices, including lieutenant governor, attorney general, state treasurer, secretary of state and auditor of accounts.

In local and regional races being decided Tuesday, Vermonters were to elect all 150 members of the state House of Representatives and 30 members of the state Senate.