By Bob Benenson

Which state gave Barack Obama his highest vote percentage in Tuesday’s election?

a) Vermont

b) Hawaii

c) Illinois

d) Rhode Island

According to unofficial returns, Obama took 72 percent of the vote in his birth state of Hawaii, his highest vote share in any state. Republican nominee John McCain took 27 percent.

Aside from his personal identification with the state where he grew up, Obama benefited from a strong partisan base in a state that is a Democratic stronghold. Democratic presidential candidates have now carried Hawaii in 11 of the 13 elections held since it became the 50th state in 1959. Still, Obama’s performance was a big uptick from Democrat John Kerry ’s 54 percent to 45 percent win over President Bush in Hawaii’s 2004 vote.

That is not, however, an all-time record in Hawaii. President Lyndon B. Johnson took 79 percent there in his 1964 national landslide.

Vermont, another of the most strongly Democratic-voting states in the nation, was the next best for Obama, who led McCain by 67 percent to 32 percent. Rhode Island, a longtime Democratic presidential bastion, went for Obama by 63 percent to 35 percent.

Obama’s adopted home state of Illinois — where his election to the Senate in 2004 launched him on his meteoric rise to the White House — does not top this list, but his constituents turned out strongly for him nonetheless. The 62 percent he received is the most ever for a Democratic presidential candidate over a GOP candidate in the once-strongly Republican “Land of Lincoln,” exceeding the 59 percent won by President Lyndon B. Johnson in his 1964 national landslide and the 58 percent for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. McCain received 37 percent of the Illinois vote.