After reading Odum’s front page piece on everyone’s favorite Vermont news publication, I decided it was worth taking a look into whether there is any real logic for the kind of editorial they put out today.  My conclusion? Yes.

The reality is that the Record’s audience is so wildly different than the rest of the state, that a Salmon campaign is probably cause for serious celebration, no matter how unappealing it may be to the rest of the state.  

These are the the 2010 VDI numbers from the Northeast Kingdom (I wish I had the New Hampshire #’s all ready to go along with them, but alas, that will be another time):

Keep in mind that the mean district in Vermont (D/R +0 on the VDI scale) is one that a Democrat wins 57-43.  The seats in the Northeast Kingdom are not ones that are home to “New England” Republicans – these are seats that would be considered conservative by much more expansive samples. If you take the average VDI of the Northeast Kingdom (approx. R +20).  If you look at that in a more national context (again, something I wish I had the numbers to do right away), you’re talking about political territory similar to the state of Montana, or Michelle Bachmann’s congressional district.  That’s an entirely different animal than Vermont politics, one in which Salmon doesn’t feel nearly as out of place.

I think the easy counter argument to this is that even if you acknowledge the terrain in the Northeast Kingdom, Sanders took every county against Tarrant in 2006, and his lowest county total is what my metric finds to be the average.  Now, I don’t know what the Caledonia Record’s editorials were like at the time – I can only imagine they put together their own little arm of the Tarrant campaign – but my guess is that while the brand may be the same between the two Sanders challengers, the style is wildly different, and Salmon is much better positioned than Tarrant to appeal to these kind of supporters.  

First off, Salmon is local, while Tarrant never was.  Even though Tarrant wasn’t a carpetbagger, his wealth created a certain degree of distance from the electorate that Salmon doesn’t have to deal with.  On top of living in the area, he’s got a name that goes back, leaving him with an even more familiar face.

On top of this, Salmon and Tarrant appeal to very different strands of the Republican party.  To use a national example, Tarrant is much more of Romney – his social conservatism was never going to be the driving point of his politics, and his major political advantage was that he could easily grab hold of the business community, and in turn, the suburban middle-class worried about the economy.  Salmon, on the other hand, is somewhat akin to a Tim Pawlenty: a politician whose bread and butter is spending and budgets, but has no problem throwing out the verbal red meat that the tea party just eats up.

At the end of the day, neither is a real, crusading social conservative – something that would probably fly with the Caledonia Record’s editorial board, but land the candidate in hot water elsewhere in the state.  Brian Dubie is probably the only candidate that satisfies those wishes, and those views were ones he had to keep buried during the campaign, because of the same reasons I’ve stated above.

I think the really interesting question in Vermont politics is which direction will the state Republican party go?  Jim Douglas is evidence of the fact that Vermonters won’t hesitate to cast votes for someone they believe to be a moderate, but that’s not where the money and excitement is right now in conservative politics.  I think Republicans in this state can either shun the national movement, try to provide a moderate voice, and win office that way (in the mold of Phil Scott), or they play games with the tea party movement, probably diminishing their electoral outcomes but leaving them with more conservative candidates when they do get in to office.

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