Vermont gave Kamala Harris a larger margin than any other state in 2024 — 31.5 points, 235,791 votes to 119,395 — trailing only the District of Columbia nationally. The state has voted Democratic for president in every election since 1992, when Bill Clinton carried it by 15.7 points and ended a streak that ran back through Lyndon Johnson; before Johnson took it in 1964, the year of its first Democratic vote, Vermont had gone Republican in every presidential election since the party’s founding. The 2024 result was a slip from the 35.4 points Joe Biden carried in 2020, a 3.9-point move, but it left Vermont first among the fifty states.
Vermont is the home of Bernie Sanders, the independent senator who has caucused with the Democrats since entering Congress in 1991, and the profile underneath is rural and homogeneous: 90 percent of residents are White, the median age of 43.4 is the third-highest of the fifty states, and 62.4 percent claim no religious affiliation — the seventh-highest share in the country and a figure that runs with neighboring New Hampshire and Maine. Of 647,106 residents, the largest reported ancestries are English at 19.1 percent and Irish at 16.8, and 44.1 percent of adults hold a bachelor’s degree, third-highest among the states.
Yet the same state re-elects a Republican governor by wide margins: Phil Scott has held the office since 2017, and in 2026 he is the presumptive Republican nominee for a sixth two-year term, with the Democratic primary unsettled and no Senate race on the ballot. The split runs through the counties. Chittenden County, which holds Burlington and casts about 26 percent of the statewide vote, voted Democratic by 53.1 points, the widest in the state; Washington County, around Montpelier, by 43.0. Even the Republican corner is mild: Essex County, the reddest, ran 15.9 points Republican, and Orleans only 1.5 — far short of the rural floors most states record.
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