No, not THAT map. Although it’s fascinating in its own way; it seems that Vermont has been gay-friendly for a very long time. Ooh, strapping young men with powerful (ahem) tools!

But I digress, and right off the top too. I’m referring to a map prepared by VTDigger’s ace data reporter Erin Petenko which I dare not reproduce for copyright reasons. You’ll have to check it out in situ. Scroll down far enough in Digger’s recap of Amanda Janoo’s primary victory and you’ll see it.

The map shows how each Vermont city and town voted in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. You can see at a glance which candidate won where. (If you run your cursor over a town, the map shows you the winner’s name and their percentage of the vote. Also, for real nerds, the caption includes a link to the Secretary of State’s Excel spreadsheet containing all the results town-by-town.)

And the map is kind of a muddle with some really interesting features.

The first thing I noticed, because of my membership on the board of The Hardwick Gazette, is that Janoo did extremely well in The Gazette’s home turf. She took 72% of the vote in Greensboro, 68% in Hardwick, 67% in Stannard, 66% in Woodbury, 65% in Craftsbury, and 60% in Walden. She also did very well in nearby communities like Elmore, Barton, and Glover, hometown and legal nemesis of Lt. Gov. John Rodgers.

Indeed, Janoo scored well across a great swath of northern Vermont from Franklin County through Lamoille and Orleans and into the Northeast Kingdom. Just south of that you find a thinner band of Aly Richards strongpoints, from the Burlington suburbs through the Barre-Montpelier area and on to the upper Connecticut River Valley. And south of that is another Janoo band in Addison, Orange, and Windsor counties. Southern Vermont is a mixed bag, with Janoo scoring well in the southeast and south central, and getting a pocket of support along the New York border in places like Middletown Springs, Wells, and Pawlet. Richards dominated the rest of the southern tier below a line from Orwell to Norwich.

See what I mean? Make sense of that, will you?

It seems to indicate that the progressive, reform-minded Janoo found quite a bit of support in parts of rural Vermont that are supposedly lost to the Democratic Party. Republicans scored big wins in 2024 in many areas that went for Janoo over Richards on Tuesday. Could there possibly be an appetite for structural reform in the boonies? Is there a chance that a candidate with new ideas can appeal to folks who feel abandoned by Vermont politics?

Might it actually be that rural residents, who’ve seen neighbors’ homes bought up by affluent absentees, perceive a benefit in imposing new taxes on second homes and high earners? A lot of rural Vermonters are Bernie Sanders fans; maybe they’re becoming Amanda Janoo fans as well.

I’m speculating, of course, and many factors could be at play. But this map sure runs counter to received political wisdom — that liberalism is a big turnoff for rural voters, and the left can’t possibly do well outside of relatively populated places like Burlington, Winooski, Barre/Montpelier, the Upper Valley area, and Brattleboro. As it happened, Janoo did well in The Noosk, the UV and Brattleboro, but she lost Montpelier and managed only tiny majorities in Barre and Burlington.

She took 52% of the Queen City vote, which ought to have been a severe disappointment and a crushing blow. But it wasn’t because she pulled higher percentages in places like Hardwick, Glover, Waterville, Fairfax, Huntington, Starksboro, Bristol, Lincoln, Orwell, Rockingham, Readsboro, and Guilford. Just to name a few.

Some of those are rural pockets of progressive politics like Putney and Greensboro, but not all of ’em. To me, this primary map indicates that more of Vermont is potentially in play than conventional wisdom would suggest. It may not be as simple as Phil Scott’s dismissal of our larger communities as fatally out of touch. There might be something happening out there in the woods, and Amanda Janoo might be tapping into an unexpected source of strength. You may have your own interpretation of this map, but now you know what I see.