Polls Spell Re-Election for Vermont Politicians

As millions of projection-hungry Americans eagerly gathered around their television and computer screens on election night to monitor the imminent electoral flood, Vermont became the first  state to break the silence when analysts tallied the state’s three electoral votes in President of the United States Barack  Obama’s column.

Although the state was called in Obama’s favor with only a tiny fraction of precincts reporting, the prediction was a safe one. Vermont — which was also the first state captured by Obama in the 2008 election — has voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1992.

Vermont was one of three states in which President Obama received the majority of votes in every county (the other entirely blue states were Governor Mitt Romney’s home state of Massachusetts and Obama’s birth state of Hawaii).

Obama’s 35.8 percent margin of victory of Vermont was the third highest in the nation for the second consecutive election, trailing only Washington, D.C. and Hawaii.

Although some votes remain uncounted, preliminary tabulations indicate that Obama captured 67 percent of the vote in Vermont compared to Romney’s 31 percent.

Although Vermont still voted decisively in favor of Obama, overall voter turnout in the state decreased. There was an 8.2 percent decrease in voter turnout in Vermont — 325,046 Vermonters voted in the 2008 election and only 298,513 voted in the 2012 election.

Although voter participation in 2012 was slightly lower than in 2008, not much else changed in Vermont’s political landscape. The state’s political composition is exceedingly homogeneous — incumbent candidates won all of the major elections in Vermont, and Democrats captured all but two of these major offices.

At the state level, incumbent Governor Peter Shumlin (Dem.) defeated candidate Randy Brock (Rep.) by a sizable 20 percent margin. Incumbent Independent Senator Bernie Sanders defeated Republican challenger John MacGovern by 46 percent and incumbent Congressman Peter Welch (Dem.) defeated challenger Mark Donka (Rep.) by an even heftier margin of 49 percent.

Incumbent Democratic Attorney General Bill Sorrell defeated Republican candidate Jack McMullen, Progressive candidate Ed Stanak and Liberty Union Party candidate Rosemarie Jackowski. Incumbent Republican Lieutenant Governor  Phil Scott, one of the few office-holding Republicans in Vermont, defeated Democratic/Progressive candidate Cassandra Gekas.