Word: vermonters
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...Vermont is blue heaven, home of Ben and Jerry and Phish, the first state with civil unions for gays, the last state with a Wal-Mart and the only state that President Bush has somehow neglected to visit. (Naylor likes to say that Bush is the unofficial membership director for his secession movement.) One Vermont Senator, Brooklyn-born Bernie Sanders, is an avowed socialist; the other, Pat Leahy, is a liberal Democrat perhaps best known for being told by the Vice President on the Senate floor to go "f--k yourself." When Manhattan-born Howard Dean served as governor...
...Nowadays, Vermont once again has a Republican governor, Massachusetts-born Jim Douglas, who's favored to win his fourth term in November. And it is a rural state, so its politicians tend to support guns and farms. It's even got some black-helicopter types in its rugged Northeast Kingdom. But thinking of Vermont as a northeastern version of Idaho or Nebraska because it's got rifles and cows is sort of like thinking of the Village People as tough guys because they had a cop and a construction worker. It's a land of teddy bears, organic cheese, planning...
...Which brings us to March 4. Vermont has the nation's second-whitest and second-oldest electorate, the kind of demographics that tend to favor Hillary Clinton in Democratic primaries. The popular former governor Madeleine Kunin is leading the Clinton campaign in Vermont, and Chelsea Clinton came to campaign on Friday. But Barack Obama is dominating the polls. "This is a state with a strong feminist tradition, but Obama's eating Hillary's lunch," says University of Vermont political science professor Garrison Nelson. Obama created quite a stir when he visited the campus last year. "I've been here...