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New #ElectionTwitter map Tuesday: Not another serial in "The Fall of the Ancestral Democrat" today, but this one is about an ancestral Republican area: the beautiful state of Vermont.
Vermont was once the reddest state in the country, voting Democratic only once in 34 elections between 1856 and 1988. Besides Maine, it was the only state to vote against FDR all 4 times. In fact, current Sen. Pat Leahy is the state's first and ONLY Democratic senator in history.
But Vermont Republicans were not like the bible-thumping modern GOP, they were a now-unseen breed of moderates and liberals once common across the Northeast, descended from Yankee Puritanism. Charlie Baker, Phil Scott, and Susan Collins are the descendants of this legacy today.
Vermont's unchanging demographics kept this Yankee Republican tradition alive, but as the GOP started its dark journey to MAGAland Vermonters began to dissociate. In 1975, they elected Leahy, and in 1980, 15% of Vermonters voted for independent liberal Republican John Anderson.
Change was coming. In 1988, Princeton and Harvard-educated Yankee Republican held his House seat against an independent socialist mayor from Burlington (gee, I wonder who that is) and a Dem State Rep. from Barre. After being basically uncontested in '86, Smith was held to 41.
Sanders did well in and around the Burlington area and the northwest, interestingly, the immediate "suburbs" surrounding Burlington went for Smith narrowly. Smith won the rest of the state handily, and Poirier did well in his native Barre and a few towns elsewhere.
The writing was on the wall for Peter Smith. The combined Democratic-leaning vote was 56%, and when Bernie Sanders ran again in 1990 without a strong Democratic candidate, he consolidated this vote and finally became the second non-Republican to represent VT-AL since 1857.
Sanders won every county, and the vote totals mirror the 1988 margins very similarly. In 1992, Clinton would win Vermont and the state has not looked back since on the federal level. Another underdiscussed factor is out-of-state liberals and hippies moving into Vermont post-60s.
Sanders would have a close race in 1994, but beyond that, this seat is safely Democratic and is one of the few examples (most are in New England) of the dying presence of rural liberalism. Even current GOP governor Phil Scott is extremely moderate for a Republican.
Peter Smith is now 74 and currently works for the Kaplan education company, so he seems to be doing well. How long do you think he would have survived if he had beaten Sanders? Where do you think 2020 would have gone had Sanders never made it to Washington? Discuss your thoughts.
