Word: vermonter
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There are swing states. There are bellwether states. And then there is Vermont...
...There is no party registration in Vermont, but it was once the most staunchly Republican state in the Union, supporting the G.O.P. in 28 straight presidential elections and enjoying a 108-year gap between Democratic governors. "It was a gray Republican backwater; being a Democrat meant FDR had appointed you to the post office," says John McLaughry, a former state legislator and Reagan Administration advisor who runs the free-market Ethan Allen Institute. An influx of urban refugees and hippie escapists from New York and Massachusetts in the 1960s and 1970s changed everything. Soon Vermont had ski resorts, billboard bans...
...Green Mountain State was once an independent republic, and it still goes its own way; a 2007 statewide poll found 13% support for secession. Vermont was the only state to support the Anti-Masonic ticket in 1832, the only state except Utah to go for President Taft in 1912, the only state except nearby Maine to oppose President Roosevelt in 1936. No one has ever claimed that as Vermont goes, so goes the nation. So on Tuesday, when Vermont's voters go to the polls, the world will be watching - Texas and Ohio...
...That makes sense. Vermont has only 625,000 residents, and they aren't wrestling with most of the problems that are dominating the campaign. Vermont doesn't have many immigrants; it ranks last in the nation in foreclosures; it's consistently rated the healthiest state. But if the politics of Vermont doesn't tell us much about the politics of America, it is still quirky and intriguing...
...with the issues; it's pop-culture noise that doesn't matter. Except it does. Entertainment surrogates can make points you wouldn't put in your candidate's own mouth. (Clinton probably could not compare herself to a mean old nun who forces you to learn the capital of Vermont. Coming from Fey, it somehow works.) They attract free media. They can capture emotion more viscerally than a policy paper. (By playing off the rhythm and call-and-response of Obama's words, Yes We Can literally rendered his prose into lyrics.) And as much as people may say that...