Updated at 4:24 p.m.
Throughout Vermont on Tuesday, voters streamed into polling places to cast their ballots in an election that has been marked by extraordinary anticipation and division at the national level and a more muted debate closer to home.
More than 220,000 Vermonters — roughly two-fifths of the state’s registered voters — had already voted before Tuesday, Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas said at a press conference that afternoon.
She said she expected overall voter turnout to be high, though she said it was too soon to say whether it would exceed the high-water mark set four years earlier, when nearly 371,000 Vermonters — or roughly 73% of registered voters — took part in the election.
“There’s a great deal of energy among Vermonters wanting to cast their ballots,” Copeland Hanzas said.
Though many voted early, some said they preferred to wait until Election Day to part with their ballot.
“I really like voting in person,” said Jenn Childress, a literacy coach from Winooski who lined up outside the Winooski Senior Center before the polls opened Tuesday morning. “There’s something about the act of showing up and voting on the day-of that feels, I don’t know, that feels right to me.”
In the Northeast Kingdom town of Glover, Sheila Fraser said she just didn’t feel confident sending her ballot in by mail. “You don’t know if it’s going to get there,” said Fraser, 70, who is recently retired. “I know it got here today.”
No matter the method, the most important thing is to vote, according to 32-year-old firefighter Nick Benson.
“My personal belief is, if you don’t vote, don’t bitch,” Benson said Tuesday morning after casting his ballot at Barre Town Middle and Elementary School.”
Though few statewide candidates in Vermont face serious challenges this cycle, Gov. Phil Scott and his fellow Republicans have sought to make the election a referendum on the Democratic supermajority that controls the Statehouse.
That message resonated for Joan Forbes, a 73-year-old Middlebury resident who owns a concrete company. Outside the Middlebury Recreation Center on Tuesday morning, she said that she was hoping to give Scott “the help that he needs to do things to make Vermont livable right now.”
But like Vermonters traditionally do, Forbes said she was splitting her ticket — voting for Republicans in statewide races and for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, for president. “That’s new for me!” she exclaimed.
Explaining her vote for Harris over former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, Forbes said, “I just don’t like the negativity. He has to badmouth everyone. People shouldn’t do that.”
The debate over affordability in Vermont also brought Ellen Oxfeld out to the Middlebury rec center Tuesday, but for a different reason than Forbes. Oxfeld, a Middlebury College anthropology professor and longtime advocate for universal health care, said she wanted to volunteer at the polls to support Democratic candidates.
“I already voted, but then I thought, ‘Our state senator is in a little bit of trouble,’ so I brought the sign, too,” she said, referring to the placard she held featuring the name of Sen. Chris Bray, D-Addison. “There are some real issues — the rise of fuel prices, the rise of property taxes.” But, Oxfeld said, many affordability challenges can be traced to the rising cost of health insurance, so the solution is to reform the health-care system.
“I think a lot of people just see property taxes going up and they say, ‘Oh, maybe this guy did it,’” she said, tapping the Bray sign she held.
Some Vermonters said Tuesday morning that they were particularly excited to vote in the presidential contest.
Georgia Bruneau, a 19-year-old student and restaurant employee from Williston, was accompanied by her parents and older sister as she cast her first vote at the National Guard Armory in town. Her father, Matt Bruneau, called out to Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, who was campaigning nearby, to tell him that he liked his shorter haircut. Her mother, Kelly Bruneau, snapped a photo of the family outside the polls.
Georgia said her parents had always emphasized to her the importance of voting. And this year, she said, that was especially true.
“I think the outcomes are going to be really impactful on society,” she said. “Depending on who wins, a lot of things could happen — either good or bad, depending on which way you see it.”
For Georgia, the decision to vote for Harris was a no-brainer. “I don’t support Trump. Never have!” she said with a laugh.
As for state races in Vermont? “I feel like it doesn’t really change around here that much,” she said.
It wasn’t just young people casting ballots for the first time on Tuesday. Kerri Surridge, 39, said outside the Barre Town Middle and Elementary School that she had never before voted.
In the past, she said, “I just didn’t feel like I was gonna make an impact.” But in 2024, amid a career shift to the insurance industry, Surridge said, she was feeling more confident about becoming civically engaged. And “I feel like the more I step out of my comfort zone, the more I’m like, ‘I am empowered and I am going to make a difference,’” she said.
Surridge’s family includes people of many political stripes, she said, and she had to “follow (her) heart” in making her choice for president. She landed on Donald Trump.
“That was a really hard choice for me, because I don’t like him as an individual, but I also feel like he’s a businessman,” she said. “And the nation itself was actually doing better (when he was president), before Harris and that whole situation started happening.”
But Surridge said she was extremely concerned about division in the U.S., noting that she had also voted for Melissa Battah, a Democrat, for state representative.
“I just think the sides are really tearing our nation apart, and we just need to stop doing blue and red, and we just need to be like, ‘What can we do to build our nation together?’” Surridge said.
Norman Boyden, 80, a retired clockmaker from Williston, stood outside the armory in his town with a sign and a hat emblazoned with the name of his friend, Bruce Roy, a Republican candidate for state Senate in the Chittenden-South district. He noted that he also had a Trump hat waiting for him in his Jeep, which featured a Trump bumper sticker.
“Trump is not a perfect person. None of us are. Has he made mistakes? Absolutely,” Boyden said. “But the other side has made far more mistakes.” Referring to two foiled assassination attempts on the Republican presidential nominee, Boyden said, “He’s risking his life to bring balance back.”
Donna Mae Peck, 78, sounded a similar note when voting at Lake Region Union High School in Barton Tuesday morning.
“The country is going to hell and we need a big change in administration,” the retired chef said of the presidency.
Peck said she believes Scott is an “excellent” governor. As for legislative Democrats? “Everything he tries to do, they override his veto,” she said.
“There are too many out-of-staters, transplants, running the state now,” she said. “They don’t seem to care what the real Vermonters want.”
Many voters on Tuesday expressed strong support for Harris.
As a Black woman whose immigrant parents hailed from Guyana and Jamaica, Winnie Wilkinson, 64, said outside St. Albans City Hall that she had been put off by Republican rhetoric disparaging immigrants. It was immigrants, she said, who built the U.S. — many of whom had been enslaved and had not chosen to leave their homes.
Wilkinson, a retired bank executive who has lived in St. Albans for 23 years, said she had voted for Harris, another child of immigrants. Among the issues that motivated her most? Abortion rights. “My back, my womb, my choice,” she said.
Cole Pappas, 22, of Randolph, also cited identity and rights as deciding factors. “It’s very important, being someone who identifies as a woman, but also nonbinary, considering a very specific candidate’s political views on my rights and (the rights of) other people like me,” Pappas said, declining to say Trump’s name.
Those rights, Pappas said in an interview outside Randolph Town Hall, included “reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, trans rights, disability rights, every single human right that deserves to be protected, which is all of them.”
As Zuckerman pressed the flesh outside the polls in Williston, the Progressive/Democratic lieutenant governor lamented what he characterized as an increase in “personal attacks” in Vermont politics this election cycle — a development he blamed on the GOP’s standard-bearer.
“The national energy led by Trump has filtered into everything,” Zuckerman said. “And I don’t mind that he has different views on things, but just the demonizing of people is not what I think represents either United States or Vermont values.”
Zuckerman’s challenger in the race for lieutenant governor, Republican John Rodgers, said Tuesday that, in the end, he could not vote for Trump or Harris. Instead, he said outside the municipal building in Glover, he had written in Scott for president.
“I thought about it long and hard,” said Rodgers, a former Democratic state senator who has since switched parties. “It’s really a protest.”
Rodgers said he would have preferred to have voted for a centrist, such as U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, or U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, an independent from West Virginia. “The left and the right wing are part of the same bird,” he said.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., appeared to have no such trouble choosing which presidential candidate to support. After casting his ballot at the Robert Miller Community and Recreation Center in Burlington on Tuesday morning, he told reporters outside that the 2024 presidential contest was “the most consequential election, I think, in the modern history of this country.”
“I hope that, if you’re in Vermont, we hope we show the way — that we need Kamala in the White House and that we defeat somebody who really is trying in many ways to undermine American democracy,” he said.
Sanders, who is running for a fourth six-year term, declined to speculate on whether Democrats might retain control of the Senate — though he noted that the party with which he caucuses was on the defensive in Senate races around the country.
In Brattleboro, U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., stood outside the American Legion hall, as she has every two years since she first sought election to the state Senate a decade ago.
But this time, she wasn’t planning to move on to a string of other campaign stops. Instead, the Democrat returned home to spend Election Day making calls for Harris.
“The most important thing for me is to make sure I have a president I can work with,” Balint said. “We have to figure out how to bring people back together.”
Correction: Earlier versions of this story misstated the party affiliation of Sen. Joe Manchin, an independent from West Virginia; mischaracterized Ellen Oxfeld’s comments and employment status; and misstated the total number of votes cast in the 2020 election.
