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, chi-chi restaurants, yoga retreats, and liberal Democrats. "That was the kickoff for our spurt into the future," McLaughry says, with more than a hint of disapproval.
Now 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, he was considered pretty conservative for a Vermont politician.
http://content.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1718795,00.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
