While both Vermont and New Hampshire voters supported Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president in Tuesday’s election, a nationwide rightward shift in voting patterns was apparent even in corners of the Upper Valley.

Harris won here by smaller margins than Biden did in 2020, and both sides of the river saw Republican gains in their state legislatures.

While a full analysis of election outcome and voter demographics will take some time, it seems clear that anxiety over affordability was a priority for those voting for Republican candidates at the state and national levels.

“We need change and we need it like it was four years ago,” Newport resident Lannie Simino, 62, said at the polls on Election Day.

“The last four years have been hell for everybody. Prices, more people coming in,” she added.

Outside the Haverhill Town Municipal Building on Tuesday, Diane Chase, 62, of Woodsville, said she has voted in every election since she was 18 years old.

“Getting this country back on line with its finances, closing the damn borders and education,” Chase said were the most important issues for her in voting on Tuesday.

Asked which presidential candidate she voted for, Chase unhesitatingly responded, “Trump, damn right,” explaining she likes “everything about him except his mouth.”

In Vermont, Republicans almost doubled their party’s representation in the state Senate, dismantling the Democrat’s veto-proof legislative “supermajority.”

In Vermont’s Upper Valley towns, Democrats won by smaller margins than in 2020 in all but a few towns. The same trend is true for Democratic-leaning towns in New Hampshire.

And all but one of the Upper Valley’s 10 Republican-majority towns saw that majority increase from 2020 to 2024.

Democrat Linda Tanner narrowly lost her Sunapee-area New Hampshire House seat to Republican George Grant by just 14 votes.

At the same, New Hampshire’s second district voters sent Democrat Maggie Goodlander to Congress, where she joins a Granite State Caucus that continues to be comprised entirely of Democrats. Though Goodlander received a smaller share of the vote than her Democratic predecessor received in the three prior elections

In New London, Democratic state Rep. Karen Ebel kept her seat in a two-seat district representing New London and Newbury, while fellow Democrat Gregory Sargent took the second seat, currently occupied by Newbury Republican Dan Wolf.

Republican Gov. Phil Scott sailed to victory in Vermont with 71% of the vote total, well ahead of Harris’ 63% share of the vote.

The GOP’s Kelly Ayotte became New Hampshire’s governor with 54% of the vote total, surpassing Harris’ 51% of the Granite State’s votes.

‘Desire for change’

The defeats in the state legislative races seem to have come as a surprise to both parties.

“As the losses started to trickle in, it was devastating,” state Sen. Becca White, D- White River Junction, said.

On a statewide level, the defeats came in “races that weren’t even on my radar as competitive,” she added.

Some of the results marked the first time in more than 20 years that districts had elected Republicans, “signaling a growing shift in voter sentiment across Windsor County and beyond,” Windsor County GOP Chairman August Murray said a news release Thursday night.

“These razor-thin margins reflect the strong desire for change and the vital importance of voter participation,” Murray’s announcement stated.

First-time candidate V.L. Coffin, R-Cavendish, identified as an independent until March. He defeated Mark Yuengling, D-Perkinsville, to represent the Windsor-2 district. Coffin said that his voters were motivated by concerns about affordability and the distress of “watching our property taxes go up year after year.”

He said that a supermajority held by any party is not healthy and ending it will create more engagement among voters.

State Senate Majority Leader Alison Clarkson, D-Woodstock, dismissed concerns about the loss of the supermajority and said its advantage for Democrats was overblown.

“We had very conservative Democrats and very progressive members of our caucus,” she said. “Every vote is discussed and weighed and worked for.”

While it’s true that Scott has issued an unusually high number of vetoes during his tenure, Clarkson attributes that to his office’s tendency to be disengaged from the legislative process until its very late stages.

“For him to be critical when he jumps in last minute with solutions that are unworkable is not a productive way for him to govern or work with the Legislature,” she said.

“We have a right to disagree with the Governor,” she added.

‘Pocketbook issues’

Incumbent Democrat Carl Demrow was unseated by Republican Michael Tagliavia for the Orange-1 House District, which includes Corinth, Orange, Vershire and Washington, by less than 200 votes.

Speaking by phone on Thursday, Demrow said that the Legislature was “not focused enough on pocketbook issues,” to voters who were feeling “squeezed by inflation and high housing costs.”

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who easily won reelection on Tuesday, was more scathing in his assessment of what he saw as the failure of the Democratic Party more broadly to speak to working class voters’ economic anxiety.

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned the working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders said in a Wednesday evening news release.

He pointed to income and wealth inequality, the lack of access to affordable health care, and a sense of political alienation among many Americans. “Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?” he wrote. “Probably not.”

(Despite Sanders’ criticism, Harris received a higher share of the vote in Vermont than he did on Tuesday.)

Dartmouth professor of government Anna Mahoney pointed to the communication styles of the two candidates to illustrate why the Harris campaign’s economic message may have fallen flat with voters.

“It appears as though the Democratic Party this time around was not effective in messaging their story and their solution wasn’t one that resonated,” said Mahoney, who is also executive director of the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences.

As a candidate, Trump identifies problems, assigns blame and proposes solutions in a way that resonates with voters, “whether or not the institutions allow him to actually put into place what he’s promising,” Mahoney said. “But in a campaign, all you’re trying to do is get people to agree with you.”

The Democratic Party’s narrative about economic conditions is different from Trump’s.

“It’s more complicated, and they don’t assign blame quite as clearly as the Republican Party does,” Mahoney said. That is partly because economic issues are complicated, but also because “they want to make sure that they are doable and that they are constitutional.”

And by the time that vetting process is complete, “you’ve lost the voter.”

Anxiety

Beyond the realm of economic anxiety, Upper Valley voters have concerns about the implications of a second Trump presidency, from dismantling regulatory frameworks to stripping away rights and protections for marginalized groups.

“The queer community in the Upper Valley has been shaken by the results,” White, the Windsor County senator, said.

She is concerned that the decisive Trump victory will embolden his followers toward more overtly hostile rhetoric and behavior.

“The way he talks about people is a model for the way other people talk, and I’m already seeing the rhetoric heat up,” White said. “I hope that we in Vermont can push back against that and remain civil.”

Planned Parenthood serves the Upper Valley with gender-affirming and reproductive health care, abortion, mental health services and prenatal care.

“We are incredibly concerned,” Jessica Barquist, vice president of Public Affairs for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said by phone Thursday.

“We are working very hard to be proactive against the various ways that Trump will try to restrict care,” she said.

“We know, looking at Project 2025, what their road map is,” Barquist said.

Project 2025 is a sweeping conservative policy blueprint for reshaping the Federal government. It calls for restricting abortion access and rolling back the rights of trans people.

Barquist noted that a federal abortion ban would supersede Vermont’s constitutional protection of reproductive rights. Passed by Vermont voters in 2022, the Reproductive Liberty Amendment protects the right of Vermonters to abortion care.

Meanwhile, Clarkson worries about retribution from the Trump Administration in the form of constraints on federal funding.

“He has punished blue states in the past,” she said. “So my guess is that we will be punished.”

Asked about meeting the needs of Vermonters under a Trump Administration likely to curtail the flow of federal dollars for social services, Coffin said, “I haven’t looked into that that far yet.”

For her part, Goodlander said Friday that she will “fight for all of the resources I possibly can for the Second District.”

Mahoney, the Dartmouth professor, warns that while retribution is a possibility, federal support for issues such as disaster relief could be impacted by the Trump Administration’s propensity toward removing people from civil service posts who don’t share his political positions. The result could be a gutting of expertise in federal agency personnel and the creation of a chaotic and ineffective administrative landscape.

Both Republican and Democratic politicians have vowed to work together across the aisle.

“Republicans have a seat at the table and I am expecting them to bring solutions,” White said. “Frankly, I didn’t hear them on the campaign trail,” she added.

Coffin said that he’s spoken with a handful of Republican representatives, and “they all want to work across the table.”

Even in Washington, Goodlander plans to “find common ground wherever it exists and work with people from all political stripes,” she said.

 Christina Dolan can be reached at cdolan@vnews.com or 603-727-3208. Valley News Staff Writers Liz Sauchelli and John Lippman contri buted to this report.