The phrase “Two Vermonts” has a long and storied history. Its roots run deeper than the origins of Vermont itself. Way back when, our B.L. Not Yet S. was the tattered rope in a tug-of-war between New Hampshire and New York. And then, for much of the Vermont Republican Party’s 100-year-plus hegemony, a governor from the eastern side of the state was inevitably succeeded by someone from the west. There was a very clear division between the two Vermonts tracing the spine of the Green Mountains.

If you do an Internet search for “Two Vermonts,” you get a staggering quantity of hits. It’s been a long time since the line was about east versus west; instead, various divisions are drawn by a writer or speaker in service of the argument they are making. The two Vermonts have been defined as, among other things: The places, rural or urban, where people are prospering versus those whose inhabitants are struggling to get by; The places where real people work hard at real jobs versus the realms of the picture-postcard; The locales struggling with drugs and crime versus the enclaves of the well-to-do and the tourists; Rural/parochial areas versus urban/cosmopolitan ones.

There are also non-geographical conceptions of Two Vermonts: A simple divide between prosperity and poverty, or between a Vermont that seriously engaged with climate change and another where harmful emissions are still on the rise.

I’ve got a new spin on this concept based on this month’s election results. If you follow I-89 from Burlington to White River Junction and I-91 from there to Brattleboro, you will have traversed one Vermont. The rest of the state, or most of it, is the other Vermont. Neat, eh?

You can see this most clearly in the incoming state Senate. There are 17 members of the Democratic/Progressive caucus, and fourteen of them hail from counties on that freeway corridor: Chittenden (6), Washington (3), Windsor (3), and Windham (2). The other three hail from Bennington (2) and Addison (1).

The geographic breakdown in the House isn’t as stark, but Democratic losses occurred mainly in rural areas: northwestern Vermont, the Northeast Kingdom, and a band across south-central Vermont below an imaginary line between Rutland and WRJ.

This echoes a nationwide trend that saw red areas trending even redder in 2024, so perhaps this shouldn’t be evaluated as a purely Vermont phenomenon. But it does pose a real question for Democrats: Can they overcome what seems to be a deepening divide between urban/suburban and exurban/rural? How do they make a comeback in the Kingdom or Franklin or Rutland? Do they have to moderate their agenda, or can they devise better messaging to convince rural voters?

Or maybe the Democratic dominance of recent years was the exception. You don’t have to go back too far to see the makeup of the Legislature staying fairly stable in similar configurations to what we’ll see in 2025: Solid Democratic control, but nowhere near supermajorities.

Well, if nothing else, this might force the Dems to seriously contest the governorship. They can’t count on overriding Phil Scott anymore.

This also works the other way, of course: If the Dems have been shut out of rural Vermont, the Republicans continue to fare poorly in most of the state’s poulation hubs. That’s the task ahead of them if they hope to make further gains in the Legislature.

And let’s not leave out the Progressives. They’ve also experienced a geographic contraction, and now have little representation outside of Chittenden County. If they hope to become a serious statewide contender, they’ll have to break out of their Burlington-area shell.

Okay, this post has turned into more of a series of questions than a neat hypothesis, but it’s only been a couple weeks since the election. It’ll take time for all this to shake out.

One more thing. Having posited my own version of Two Vermonts, I have to say this situation is far from unique to our B.L.S. I hail from Michigan, and you can find plenty of “Two Michigans,” from the obvious Lower Peninsula/Upper Peninsula to the urban vs. rural to a variety of imaginary dividing lines. In fact, if you want to see a dramatic divide, the election left Michigan Democrats with one single solitary state lawmaker from anywhere north of Saginaw, which is pretty damn far south compared to the vast expanses of northern Michigan. My home state’s Dems are dealing with a much starker “Two Michigans” divide than Vermont Dems will ever see.

I suspect that if I knew more about, say, North Dakota, I’d hear talk of ‘Two North Dakotas.” It’s nothing particularly special about Vermont or its politics; it has more to do with factors that tend to split any state or nation into different camps that often struggle to understand one another. Oh dear, have I just struck another blow against Vermont Exceptionalism?