Most of the business owners are originally from NYC. I mean the people who own bed & breakfasts. They are all retired Wall Street types.
There are big business owners like Ben & Jerry that were hippies from NYC. They moved there in the 60s. Got rich making ice cream.
The ski areas are mostly owned by out of state corporations.
Most of the people that work there a seasonally employed. In fact they bring in a lot of people on work visa's during the winter ski season. The people that live there year round are unemployed ski bums in the summer. Maybe they paint and do landscaping or go on welfare.
Burlington is a big college town. UVM and another smaller college dominate the town. All the kids are hipsters.
Subaru's are big sellers. This is where most of the people live. Brattleboro is the next largest town. It is economically depressed.
The rest of VT is very rural. There are more cows than humans. The only real conservatives are the actual dairy farmers. Which there are quite a few. They are hard working salt of the earth types. They are outnumbered by the hipsters and slacker ski bums.
Lastly, there are the people who own all the expensive houses/condos at or near the ski areas. They are all from western MA, CT & NY. It is a straight shot up I91.
Many of these people moved there during covid. Just like they did to many other rural areas because they could work from home.
Keep in mind, VT has the highest percentage of WHITE PEOPLE in the USA(95%). They do have a Somalian population in Burlington. They tend to kill each other over control of the local drug trade. Other than that VT has the lowest overall crime rate in the country. It is a very safe place to live.
My mother’s sister attended Middlebury College and had a cottage in the town. Her husband was a surgeon in Washington DC and she was the assistant principal of Chevy Chase high school. Her son, also a Middlebury grad, retired to his mothers old million-dollar lakeside cottage in Middlebury. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, raised in Chevy Chase, he is a raving entitled liberal, and epitomizes everything wrong with Vermont, and the DC suburbs.
I don’t doubt any of that. But the ones that are over here constantly shopping because of the lack of sales tax, are just weird.
I have met some very nice, conservative Vermonters, but they are outweighed by the others. It gets much worse up near Dartmouth.