Temporarily embarrassed hillbilly millionaires.
Word. Knowing where and on what to focus is a critical skill in winning elections.
Yeah, the caricature of Vermont as the place to where kooky NYers migrate to live off the land and enjoy hemp in peace is amusing, but it’s just a caricature.
Though reliably “blue” in presidentials (in contrast to NH being “swing”) Vermont has elected Republican governors as recently as 2003-2011 and 2017-today. These are the last redoubt of your old school “Eastern Republican” type, as opposed to Movement Conservatives, mind you (work led me to be part of some meetings with Jim Douglas back when he was in office), but still it’s not as simple as red/blue.
Vermont, though, still does have some elements of more libertarian bent such as their notoriously easy firearms laws, reflecting their ruralness. But in general they lean liberal on the greater social issues and that’s reflected in their Congressional and Presidential resutls.
Because I am procrastinating about some other project (also involving data) I decided to cook up a quick model of Biden’s vote share regressed on some basic variables like white/urban share of population and region. It’s not a great model (adjusted Rsquared of 0.53 but it’s a start).
One of the biggest outliers is Vermont where the model predicts 46% and Biden got 66%. Washington and Wisconsin are two other states where Biden got more than 10 points more than predicted. In Indiana Biden got 3% more than predicted and in Ohio 6%. Two states where Biden got less than predicted by 11% are Florida
and New Jersey.
Actually I am becoming intrigued and wonder which other variables would improve the model. Maybe I will work on it and post my results some time. This type of simple statistical model isn’t rigorous but it’s a good starting point for analysis IMO.
I checked out a list of percentage of the state is evangelical Christian and it’s a good indicator of whether they voted for Biden or Trump. Of the top 20 percentage of evangelical Christians only Georgia and Virginia voted for Biden. And of the bottom 20 only Utah, Wyoming and North Dakota voted for Trump. Apparently they didn’t consider mormons as evangelical Christians which is why Utah is on the bottom 20.
I added percentage of Bachelors and Masters degrees and not surprisingly this adds a lot of explanatory power to the model. Vermont is still a big outlier. I think religion may well be a key variable. Vermont appears to be low on that so that may be a key factor why it’s so blue.
Massachusetts, which absolutely no one would consider a red state, has had Republican governors 22 of the 30 years since 1991.
Of course, the legislature and pretty much any statewide or federal office (except for Lieutenant Governor and 4 years of Scott Brown in the Senate) has been solidly Democratic over that same period.
A model with just 3 variables: the percentage which is white, has a Master’s degree and attends weekly worship can explain 85% of the variation of Biden’s vote share. Incidentally the model is almost dead on for predicting Indiana. Relative to race and education, perhaps religiosity is underrated today as a political factor.
New Mexico hasn’t always been Democratic, and until very recently, it has elected a variety of both Rs & Ds to state-wide elections. In 2000, Gore won by just 336 votes — a 0.06 % margin.
NM has 47% Hispanic population — the largest percentage in the USA — which does lean Democratic. It’s been slowly increasing (it was 38% in 1990), which is probably the biggest factor of the dominance of Democrats in state-wide elections today. The Southeast corner of NM does tend to be very conservative, it’s culturally very similar to West Texas. Hence NM-2 district is very reliably Republican and has only been D for 2 year periods during blue waves (2008 & 2018).
I used this FiveThirtyEight piece from September in my Political Geography course — “Being white and also an evangelical Protestant is strongly correlated with voting Republican — much more so than being white and not having a college degree.” (Piece is linked below; link in previous quote is to an original data source).
As A West Virginian I think that the switch for Dem to Repub is strictly economic. Decades of a lousy economy eventually caused people to give up on Dems. Other factors contribute of coarse, racism, stupidity being major ones but it is really the economy.