Why is/was President Obama so amazingly popular in Vermont?

[Obnoxiously Slutty Girly Girl]

Vermont has been trending away from the Republican party for some time now. The party of war and corporate bailouts represented by Bush and McCain forced them into the arms of the Democrats.

[Obnoxiously Slutty Girly Girl]

Vermont is also 98% white. Voting for a black is exotic and makes Vermonters feel all warm and fuzzy and tolerant.

[Obnoxiously Slutty Girly Girl]

Vermont is also 98% white. Voting for a black is exotic and makes Vermonters feel all warm and fuzzy and tolerant.

Which apparantly doesn't apply to the Dakotas, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and a host of other near all-white states that didn't back Obama because.....?

For that matter, New Hampshire's hardly an ethnic melting pot and gave Obama only 54% compared to 67% in Vermont.

All of those states swung Democratic in 2008.

Obama's margin in New Hampshire was held down by the few populous counties, of which there are none in Vermont. The two states have rather different political cultures and a Democrat starts off with a much stronger position in VT than in NH.

Merely being black isn't what won Vermont for Obama, but he had a much higher ceiling there than in a racially polarized state like Arkansas, or North Carolina for that matter.

[Obnoxiously Slutty Girly Girl]

I still think it was social issues that swung VT to the Dems since 1992.

The main point is there : Vermont isn't a Dem State since 1992, but instead since 1980, when Reagan barely won the State while sweeping the country. Since then, Democrats have always done better there than nationwide. If its clear that the trend intensified in the 1990s, 1992 ceartainly isn't the tipping point.

Uh, yeah, Reagan won Vermont by a larger margin than he won many Southern states, so your argument pretty much fails. John Anderson's voters weren't going to vote for Carter.

[Obnoxiously Slutty Girly Girl]

1. They certainly weren't going to vote massively for Carter, but certainly a fair share of them would have.
2. If you notice, Anderson's voting patterns are quite similar to those of the democrats today, so the fact he was so strong in VT is also a kind of hint of it becoming a democratic State.

I'm assuming Anderson's votes would have split evenly between Reagan and Carter, in which case Reagan would still have won by a 6 point margin, which is pretty good (considering the South was closer)



In fact, Carter needed over 2/3rds of the Anderson vote to win Vermont, and I think that's pretty generous to Carter, even for such modern Democratic states like Vermont.

It's unlikely that Carter, losing nationally by 10 points, would have done better than the 43.14% he got in Vermont in a winning election in 1976.

So even if you generously assume that there would be absolutely no swing away from the Democrats (highly unlikely), Carter should only have picked up about 4.73% from Anderson. Give the rest to Reagan, and Reagan narrowly outperforms Ford, winning Vermont by 11.4%.

Of course, considering that election was largely a referendum on Carter and his unpopularity, even giving him that much is probably too generous.


Antonio's claims fail on so many levels. You seriously didn't get how the Southern states' results totally undermined your "Vermont is Democratic since 1980 because Reagan barely won the State while sweeping the country" argument?

[Obnoxiously Slutty Girly Girl]

Probably "barely" wasn't the right word, but my point remains.

Everybody can make any conjecture on what the results have been if Anderson hadn't run. It would be stupid to think Reagan would have won 59/38, and equally stupid to think it would have been a 53/44 Carter win. Besides that, almost everything is possible.

In no Northeastern state did Carter 1980 outperform or even match his 1976 performance. You are seriously arguing that without Anderson, Carter would have lost none of the 43% of the vote he got in 1976, despite a 12-point national swing away from the Dems?

The way you're arguing it sounds like you think Carter would have done even better than the 43% he got when he won nationally in 1976. There's just no reason to believe Vermont would have bucked the national trend that hard. Anderson voters were just as unhappy with the Carter administration as Reagan voters. They were more likely to vote for Reagan or just stay home than to vote for Carter.

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No, that's you deliberately misinterpreting math without putting things into context. Massachusetts and Washington D.C. trended Republican in 2008 relative to the national swing, I guess they're going to be GOP states now.

[Obnoxiously Slutty Girly Girl]

In no Northeastern state did Carter 1980 outperform or even match his 1976 performance.

Indeed, how comes Vermont was the only State swinging to Carter in 1980 despite Anderson got similar scores in several other State ?

You have to put statistics into context. Carter lost Vermont by double digits in 1976. That same election he won Massachusetts and Rhode Island, came very close in Maine, and fairly close in Connecticut. Obviously it's going to be a lot easier to cause a swing in Vermont with a candidate splitting the GOP vote. The Republican Party lost votes, but they didn't go to the Democrats. It didn't "swing to Carter".

You can't just look at a swing map and immediately draw conclusions. Every state is red on the 1976 swing map, but that wasn't because Carter was an excessively popular candidate.


Also it's worth noting that Vermont was still Carter's worst state in the Northeast in terms of vote share.

(Excepting New Hampshire, of course, which is not really comparable considering it's voting patterns have a long history of being at odds with the rest of New England.)

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The question isn't whether they would have backed Reagan. The question is whether they would have voted for Carter. And the answer to that question is no.

You still have yet to put forth a compelling argument as to why Vermont would go against a 12 point national swing and give overwhelmingly unpopular Southern incumbent Carter a higher share of the vote than the 43% they gave him in 1976.