|Elections in Vermont|
The 1956 United States presidential election in Vermont took place on November 6, 1956, as part of the 1956 United States Presidential Election which was held throughout all contemporary 48 states. Voters chose three representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
Vermont voted overwhelmingly for the Republican nominee, incumbent President Dwight D. Eisenhower of Pennsylvania, over the Democratic nominee, former Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson. Eisenhower ran with incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon of California, while Stevenson's running mate was Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.
Eisenhower took a landslide 72.16 percent of the vote to Stevenson’s 27.81 percent, a victory margin of 44.35 percent. This was the most lopsided statewide win of the election.
Vermont historically was a bastion of liberal Northeastern Republicanism, and by 1956 the Green Mountain State had gone Republican in every presidential election since the founding of the Republican Party. From 1856 to 1952, Vermont had had the longest streak of voting Republican of any state, having never voted Democratic before, and this tradition easily continued in 1956 with Eisenhower’s landslide win.
Eisenhower, a war hero and moderate Republican who had pledged to maintain popular New Deal Democratic policies, had wide appeal beyond the boundaries of the traditional Republican coalition. While Vermont had been one of the only two states (the other being Maine) in the nation to vote against Franklin Roosevelt all four times, the GOP margins in the state had narrowed substantially in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly due to the strong Democratic presence in the northwestern part of the state. However Eisenhower’s unique personal appeal brought even that region back into the GOP coalition, and allowed him to break seventy percent in the state in both 1952 and 1956, the first Republican to do so since Calvin Coolidge in 1924, and the last Republican to date.
Eisenhower swept every county in Vermont, breaking seventy percent in eleven of the fourteen counties. The three northwestern counties of Vermont had long been Democratic enclaves in an otherwise Republican state through the 1930s and 1940s, but Eisenhower won them back for the GOP in both 1952 and 1956, in the latter case even breaking sixty percent in Grand Isle County. The region still remained the most Democratic in the state, as Eisenhower received less than sixty percent of the vote in Chittenden County and Franklin County, while every county outside the northwest broke seventy percent for Eisenhower. In three counties Eisenhower even broke eighty percent of the vote. No Republican presidential candidate since has surpassed Eisenhower’s 72.16 percent vote share or his 44.35 percentage point margin of victory, as by the late 1950s cracks were already beginning to form in the Republican stranglehold on Vermont, and the GOP shifted toward an increasingly Southern and conservative party beginning in the 1960s.
Even as Eisenhower won a decisive re-election landslide nationally, Vermont weighed in as a whopping 29 percentage points more Republican than the national average, making Vermont the most Republican state in the union in the 1956 election . While Vermont had been the most Republican state in the nation in many elections prior to 1956, this would prove the last election when the Green Mountain State would hold that title.
|United States presidential election in Vermont, 1956 |
|Republican||Dwight D. Eisenhower||110,390||72.16%||3|
|Dwight David Eisenhower
|Adlai Stevenson II
|Margin||Total votes cast |
- Although he was born in Texas and grew up in Kansas before his military career, at the time of the 1952 election Eisenhower was president of Columbia University and was, officially, a resident of New York. During his first term as president, he moved his private residence to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and officially changed his residency to Pennsylvania.
"The Presidents". David Leip. Retrieved September 27, 2017.
Eisenhower’s home state for the 1956 Election was Pennsylvania
- "1956 Presidential Election Statistics". Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. Retrieved 2018-03-05.
- "1956 Presidential General Election Results - Vermont". Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. Retrieved 2013-08-02.
- Scammon, Richard M. (compiler); America at the Polls: A Handbook of Presidential Election Statistics 1920-1964; p. 466 ISBN 0405077114
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