By Jessica Benton Cooney, CQ Staff

Republicans know this is not their father’s, grandfather’s or great-grandfather’s Vermont. A stronghold of “Yankee Republicanism” from the time the party was born in the middle of the 19th century into the 1980s — the only state other than Maine to vote for Alf Landon in 1936 and against giving Franklin D. Roosevelt a second term — Vermont has swung decisively the other way in the past two decades. Its Democratic lean is so solid that John McCain is prepared to give the state a wide berth this fall.

The last Republican who won Vermont’s three electoral votes was George Bush in 1988. In four elections since, the state has gone Democratic by an average margin of 17 percentage points. Howard Dean, the 2004 presidential contender who is chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was governor from 1991 to 2003. The state’s last Republican senator was James M. Jeffords, and six months into his third and final term in 2001, he declared himself an independent and started caucusing with the Democrats, effectively flipping partisan control of the Senate. Six-term Democratic Sen. Patrick J. Leahy , who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is a liberal stalwart; freshman Sen. Bernard Sanders is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats but has never joined the party because he believes it isn’t liberal enough. Peter Welch , the freshman Democrat who holds the state’s lone House seat, appears firmly ensconced.

This shift was in ways typical of New England, where some conservative-leaning Yankees held socially libertarian views and where religious conservatives make up a relatively small part of the population. Vermont’s transition was sharper because its small population was infused by outsiders who migrated from urban areas of the Northeast.

Nonetheless, the success of moderate Republican Gov. Jim Douglas , who has won three two-year terms since 2002 and is favored to win a fourth this fall, shows how “Vermonters like to split their tickets,” according to Eric Davis, a Middlebury College political science professor. By his estimate, a third of those who voted for Douglas in 2004 also voted for John Kerry .