I can never remember which is Vermont, and which is New Hampshire. But Vermont is rock-solid Democratic, and New Hampshire is a swing state. Why are they so different?
And New Mexico is also solid blue Democrat; sandwiched between dead red Arizona and Texas. What is about New Mexico that sets it apart from its neighbors?
Obviously it’s the word “New”. The formula goes like this- if a state has “New” in its name, it has to go against the grain, politically, from its neighbors. Unless it’s New York. NY is the exception that proves the rule.
For some reason, I always remember that originally the colonies of New Hampshire and New York quarrelled over the land in between, which later became Vermont. So Vermont is the one in between the other two.
Not much of a mnemonic I guess. But that’s how I used to remember it.
Both States were hardcore GOP until recently. IIRC, Vermonts streak of voting for Republican candidates is the longest single party voting streak in US history.
During the Clinton Administration, VT turned blue and never really looked back. I’d tend to attribute this more to the national GOP chasing the Southern, religious conservative vote, leaving the more secular, socially liberal VT behind rather then any internal change in VT itself.
NH has a reputation of remaining conservative, but I’d say they’ve simply been going through a slower version of the same process. In the last five elections, they’ve only gone Republican once. 2010 elected a bunch of Republicans to State and Federal offices, but before that those seats had been trending Dem as well.
So short answer: the GOP abandoned New England Conservatives to chase the more numerous votes of Southern Conservatives, and as a result VT, NH and Maine have been drifting blue at varying rates.
I used to get them confused, too, until I moved to Boston. If it helps the OP, remember that New Hampshire has the shortest ocean coastline of any state. So it must be the eastern of the two.
Used to get Mississippi and Alabama mixed up. Mississippi must border the Mississippi River, obviously, and the river runs through New Orleans, so Mississippi must be the one that borders Louisiana.
New Hampshire might be feeling some effects from the Free State Project with two caveats:
I doubt FSP is actually big enough to have much effect on NH politics
There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg quandary here: the FSP selected NH in part because of it’s reputation for small-government, individualist leanings that separated it from it’s neighbors even then.
Despite electing idiots such as John McCain, Jan Brewer, and Sheriff Dumbfuck, Arizona is quickly losing its red status and definitely turning purple. Same with Texas. Changing demographics result in changing political ideology.
I think the OP may be based on a false premise, i.e. that political inclinations of states are uniformly distributed.
In reality, most states contain pockets of Red and pockets of Blue, and if one state happens to contain more of one than the other, that impacts the overall composition of the state.
Well, then, let me phrase the OP differently: why would New Mexico contain more pockets of blue than Arizona, when they are so similar geographically and demographically?
Are they that similar? AZ is full of white transplants from the rest of the country, including CA. In addition to retirees, who tend to be the wealthier ones with the resources to retire in style, the younger migrants come for cheaper real estate, lower taxes, less regulation, and more open spaces. Natural Pubbies.
NM is substantially Latino, both new migrants and centuries old communities, and Native American, with nowhere near as many Anglo transplants.