This shows how Democratic relative to the national average Vermont was in Presidential elections since 1988:
1988: D+2
1992: D+3
1996: D+4
2000: D+2 (due to Nader)
2004: D+11
2008: D+15
Keep in mind that Obama won a greater nationwide % of the vote than Kerry did, and thus it is expected that he would do better percentagewise in Vermont. Vermont did trend a little Democratic between 2004 and 2008, though. In 2004, Vermont was 11% more Democratic than the national average, while in 2008, Vermont was 15% more Democratic than the national average.
Thank you for the explanation, but why Vermont has trended so strong since 1988?
Vermont is a very social liberal state in the old Congregationalist tradition. Way back when, that meant support for abolition, then for prohibition, then for women's suffrage, causes championed primarily by the Republicans. As a result, Vermont was an incredibly tribally Republican state during the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries.
However, the Republican leadership abandoned social liberalism around the time of the Civil Rights movement with the adoption of the Southern Strategy (an attempt to exploit the national Democrats' support for civil rights to break the historical Democratic stranglehold on the South and appeal to conservative Southern whites). The unwind among social liberal voters from this was slow to occur, but it was clear that it was occurring by 1980, when ex-Republican John Anderson won much of the tribal New England Republican vote running as a social liberal independent.
This was accelerated during the 1980s by the collapse of the Dixiecrats, ultra-conservative Southern Democrats who had kept the party away from explicit endorsement of many social liberal positions. The surviving Dixiecrats were mostly defeated in the 1994 wave, and the Democrats became clearly defined as the party for social liberals.
As a result of this transformation of the Democratic Party, and the earlier transformation of the Republicans, Vermont, the epitome of social liberalism in the United States, swung dramatically from among the strongest Republican states in the 1970s to the strongest Democratic state today as its partisan voting moved in line with its ideology.
