Vermont’s state motto is “Freedom and Unity.” New Hampshire’s is “Live Free or Die.” Those seven words speak volumes about the differences between the New England neighbors, which share a watery border and similar topography but little else.
Vermont, home to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, has no Dairy Queen outlets, whereas New Hampshire has more than a dozen. New Hampshire has more places to buy a Harley-Davidson motorcycle; the Green Mountain State, twice as many stores to buy Birkenstocks.
But the differences extend far beyond hogs and sandals. In New Hampshire, someone can buy a motorcycle without paying sales tax, then drive it through a billboarded landscape sans helmet, a reflection of the state’s libertarian leanings. Vermont, which banned billboards in 1968, has among the country’s highest tax burdens — and one of its most generous social safety nets.
Vermont now votes reliably blue, with independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders zigzagging the country to campaign on behalf of progressive-leaning candidates, many of whom identify as democratic socialists. Meanwhile, New Hampshire remains a purple swing state, drawing national attention as the first state to vote in presidential primaries. Like Vermont, it has a Republican governor and a Democratic Congressional delegation. But unlike Vermont’s, its state legislature is controlled by Republicans.
How did the two neighbors, which fit together like yin and yang and are strikingly similar in size, shape and demographics, develop such divergent political tendencies?
In his new book, Twin States, Different Paths: The Politics of New Hampshire and Vermont, author Brian L. Porto argues that those identities were forged from different “raw materials of political culture” back in the 18th century. The early divergence still manifests in each state’s priorities today, with New Hampshire prizing freedom from government and Vermont, community and cooperation.
“In New Hampshire they fight taxes,” he said in an interview. “In Vermont, Walmarts.”
Porto, 74, is a professor emeritus of law at Vermont Law & Graduate School and has worked in both states. A New York native who moved to Vermont in 1990, he has published several previous books on legal topics. Seven Days spoke to Porto recently from his home in Windsor.
How did Vermont and New Hampshire differ early on in their history?
For one, New Hampshire was settled almost 150 years before Vermont. And each state got very different gifts from Mother Nature. New Hampshire is essentially a large river valley. You’ve got the Piscataqua River in the east, the Merrimack River in the center and the Connecticut River in the west. New Hampshire got great water power but lousy soil. So New Hampshire’s farmers gave up the ghost pretty early. By the middle of the 19th century, there began to be a large exodus off the farms. The boys tended to go west for better land, and their sisters often went to work in the mills of Lowell, Mass., or Nashua and Manchester, N.H.
Vermont remained agrarian much longer. Because Vermont’s small farming towns couldn’t support their schools, roads and other services, after the Civil War they began demanding help from the state in a big way.
That didn’t happen to the same extent in New Hampshire. It became more industrial, especially having access to seaports. And the presence of the seaport had a couple of big consequences: One was that, beginning in the colonial era, New Hampshire developed social cleavages. Ship captains and merchants got very wealthy and built palatial homes that you can still see if you take a tour of Portsmouth, whereas farmers in the interior were generally poor and doing subsistence agriculture. That created a social discord in New Hampshire that didn’t exist in Vermont. It’s why the back-to-the-land folks in the 1960s and ’70s mostly didn’t go to New Hampshire. They went to Vermont because they wanted to do old-fashioned agriculture.
Have New Hampshire and Vermont always been so different?
They haven’t always been as different as they are now. Both were overwhelmingly Republican states for over 100 years, beginning in the 1850s. In the late 1950s Vermont started to make slight moves to the left. Robert Larrow, the gubernatorial candidate for the Democrats in 1952, lost, but he got a much higher percentage of the vote than any Democratic candidate had for 100 years. In 1958, Democrat William Meyer won the U.S. House seat for the first time in over a century. Then, in 1962, Phil Hoff became the first Democrat to win as governor since 1853.
And then we launched into an interesting scenario whereby every time a long-term incumbent governor of one party retired, they were replaced by a member of the opposing party. It started when Hoff retired in 1969 and was replaced by Deane Davis, a Republican. We have continued that pattern ever since.
When did New Hampshire become a “purple” state?
It started to change in the 1960s and ’70s, brought on by high-tech industries leaving Massachusetts and going to New Hampshire. New Hampshire had a lot of migration, with most migrants coming from Massachusetts. Many were tax-weary corporate executives, and a lot of them were Democrats. By about 1980 the gap in registration between Republicans and Democrats had been cut in half. So you started to see more Democrats being elected, especially to Congress.
The “raw materials of political culture” you mention in the book also include each state’s advertising and place reputation. Can you explain it?
Vermont was the first state to have a publicity bureau, beginning in 1911. The two states have since marketed themselves very differently. New Hampshire has tended to push its low cost of living. Later, it promoted the number of golf courses and other amenities it has, such as a racetrack, which makes sense. If you’re trying to appeal to people from Boston and New York City, you don’t want them to think that moving to New Hampshire is going to be one endless camping trip.
Vermont was entirely different. It promoted its rural way of life, that this is a wonderful place to walk in the woods and think, write and paint. So that’s who we got: a lot of professors who had time off in the summer, as well as artists and writers. So the two states’ respective personalities are very much reflected in the way they promoted themselves, and that has perpetuated itself.
New Hampshire is often assumed to be more libertarian, though not always.
Two things actually surprise me about New Hampshire where it hasn’t acted in a very libertarian way. One is the cannabis issue, and the other is medically assisted suicide. Vermont has provided a way for people to do [both], and New Hampshire has not.
For this book I focused on common problems that the states have — housing and school finance — and how they’re responding differently.
Vermont has been trying to transform its school funding system, and New Hampshire has been trying to avoid carrying out the state supreme court’s mandate to alter its school funding system. Those issues have been going on for quite a while, and both states need to solve them pretty soon because they’re facing serious problems because of them.
Vermont needs workers but is having trouble getting them because we can’t house them. In New Hampshire last year, the median price of a house was $565,000. How many people can afford that? School funding is related to the housing crisis because people want to live in communities with good schools. But if the schools are funded inequitably, where the poorer towns cannot provide the same school offerings as wealthier ones, then inevitably you end up with a system where people gravitate to the wealthier towns.
You describe some of New Hampshire’s libertarian tendencies as self-defeating. Are some of Vermont’s more progressive tendencies also self-defeating?
Vermont’s big challenge is how to continue to meet people’s needs and be bold in making policy without going too far and overtaxing and overregulating people to the point where they rebel. Act 181, the land-use law that passed in 2024, is a good example. Nobody objected to the part of the law that said we’re going to make it easier to build apartments in town centers. But the second part of the law set up three tiers of land within the state. Tier one was for downtown development; tiers two and three were for more rural areas. To do things in tier two and three, which covered the most rural and ecologically sensitive areas, you had to go through the Act 250 land-use process.
The complaint from a lot of folks, particularly in the Northeast Kingdom, was that if you’re very wealthy and you’re building your palatial second home, you can probably afford to go through the Act 250 process. But a lot of Vermonters don’t have that kind of wherewithal. So it was easy for people in the Kingdom to say, “Oh, it’s those damn liberals from Chittenden County trying to tell us again how to live our lives.” And so those parts of Act 181 were repealed.
What can Vermont learn from New Hampshire, and vice versa?
In situations like Act 181, if legislators had solicited more opinions from the people most likely to be affected, they might have learned the views of people who didn’t share their conservation ethic. New Hampshire could certainly learn from Vermont on the school funding issue. Vermont had one supreme court decision, in Brigham v. State, that dealt with it back in 1997, and the Vermont legislature didn’t say, “How can we fight this?” They still haven’t gotten it right 30 years later, but they’re working on it.
What New Hampshire has done is to shoot the messenger and essentially say, “We know the state supreme court was wrong in 1993. It was wrong in 1997. It was wrong in several other decisions that said it’s the state’s responsibility to fund education.” Some 30 years later, they’re still shooting the messenger — and they’re still 50th in the nation in terms of state contributions to education. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Twin Paradox | A new book tackles an age-old question: Why are Vermont and New Hampshire politically so different?”
This article appears in October 28 • 2026.
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