Bernie Sanders' Vermont is also home to a hardy band of Trump supporters

From Delaware — home state of former Vice President and Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden — north to New Jersey and the suburbs of New York and on to Vermont and New England, Democrats can count on heavy support in the 2020 election. And yet, as veteran USA TODAY NETWORK columnist Mike Kelly and visual journalist Chris Pedota found, resilient pockets of Trump supporters persist amid this Democratic landscape. This is the final installment in a five-part series,"Red Islands in the Blue Sea.”

BURLINGTON, Vermont — Being a supporter of President Donald Trump in this lakeside city that gave birth to Bernie Sanders’ style of socialism, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and the uber-hippie jam-band Phish can result in some strange encounters.

Consider the plight of Norman Joshua Boyden III, a clock-maker known to most people as “Pat” because he was born on St. Patrick's Day.

Near sundown on an otherwise quiet Sunday a few weeks before the November 2016 presidential election, Boyden gazed out the front window of his small home in the Burlington suburb of Williston. Parked at the end of Boyden’s driveway — where he erected a 2-by-5-foot sign proclaiming his allegiance to Trump — was a police car with its red and blue lights pulsating.

The sign was gone.

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What happened next says as much about the improvisational style of Vermont politics as what it’s like to be a Trump supporter in a state where disdain for the president seems as common as maple syrup and ski resorts.

Handcuffed at the end of Boyden's driveway was Rashid H. Atweh, 23, of nearby Essex. Cops arrested Atweh for destroying Boyden's Trump sign.

Boyden, 75. who labors quietly most days his home on all manner of clocks was fuming. His sign overlooking Williston’s well-traveled Essex Road had been kicked, cut, punched and sprayed with graffiti, he said.

Things were so bad that Boyden, a former U.S. Army captain who fought in Vietnam, even considered strapping a pistol to his belt and venturing outside to confront intruders. But he thought better of it.

“I vowed I wouldn’t kill someone just for vandalizing my Trump sign,” said Boyden. 

Still he wanted Atweh to pay for his crime — just not behind bars. On the advice of police, Boyden agreed that Atweh could enter a court diversion program. 

For several months, Boyden accompanied Atweh to meetings where the two discussed their differences. In the end, Atweh’s record was expunged and Boyden went back to building and fixing clocks — and still supporting Trump. He now flies a Trump flag on his front lawn.

But Boyden suffers in other ways — two of his three adult daughters no longer speak to him because of his allegiance to Trump.  

Today's Vermont leans left, but is often divided

Vermont likes to tout itself as a corner of America with a unique political style.

It was the first state to abolish slavery and sanction same-sex legal unions. More recently, it embraced one of America's most permissive abortion laws, which some critics say allows women to terminate pregnancies in the ninth month. 

But for all its liberal leanings, Vermont ranks behind New York and New Jersey in enacting tough gun laws. And four years ago Vermont discovered its progressive impulses had limits, too.

State leaders threw their support behind a dramatic proposal, pushed by Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin, that would give health insurance to all residents and eliminate private health plans. But the idea collapsed when Shumlin felt voters would not stomach the high tax hike needed to pay for the plan.

Vermont's current Gov. Phil Scott, elected in 2017, is seen as a fiscal watchdog.

But while Scott is officially a Republican, he is hardly shy about denouncing Trump — or distancing himself from some of his party’s more conservative positions. Not only has Scott harshly criticized Trump’s policies, he is the only GOP governor — and one of the party’s few major elected officials in the nation — to support the current impeachment inquiry by the House of Representatives.

Vermont lines up just behind Maine as America's whitest state — with nearly 94 percent of its 627,000 residents labeling themselves as Caucasian in U.S. Census. But Trump, who looks to white voters as a cornerstone of his support, managed to garner only 30 percent of the vote in the 2016 presidential election. 

“A lot of people in rural and working-class Vermont feel they are being left behind by liberals in Burlington and other places,” said Bertram Johnson, a political science professor at Vermont's Middlebury College. “There are frustrations in the rural areas. Burlington is doing fine, but people in rural areas and working-class communities have trouble making ends meet.”

Johnson says such a split among Vermont voters is something of a “cultural divide” — what he describes as an “urban-rural split” or a “new Vermont versus old Vermont” sense of life and politics.

“It’s been a phenomenon since the 1960s,” Johnson said. “There are the stereotypes – the new Vermonters who come up to go skiing, buy a second home, smoke pot and eat Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Then there are the people who have been here for generations who operate small farms and small businesses. They feel they are getting left behind.”'

Vermont's biggest city is the state's progressive engine

Burlington, a city of around 42,000 residents overlooking Lake Champlain and, in the distance, New York’s Adirondack Mountains, has come to stand for the state’s progressive politics.

Burlington's city council recently passed a resolution to study the possibility of allowing any resident — including undocumented immigrants — to vote. Approval of  the measure, which was rejected in a city-wide vote in 2015, is far from certain. But it nevertheless embodies the progressive vibe that Burlington projects, not just in its government but also in local businesses. 

A coffee shop called The Perky Planet, which also claims to sell “social revolution,” sits across from Burlington’s Planned Parenthood offices. A store called Peace and Justice, which sells clothes and educational items, overlooks Lake Champlain. 

Burlington also launched Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Elected Burlington’s mayor in 1981 by just 10 votes, Sanders eventually built a sizable following in the city, easily winning reelection. And while his rise to power was seen by some as a fluke, he was later elected to Vermont’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, then to the U.S. Senate, all without dialing back on his left-wing views.

Vermont Trump supporters see Sanders as representing all that is wrong in government.

“We think he’s crazy,” said Deb Billado, Vermont’s state Republican party chairwoman. “He gets out there with his electric hair and promises a lot of free stuff and people are attracted to him.”

Such exaggerations are common among pro-Trump voters. Last August, Billado called Trump critics a “mob of hate-crazed, fear-driven people who have become deranged because he upset their dreams (our nightmare) of electing crooked Hillary Clinton.”  

The political reality is far more complicated and nuanced.

Today, Sanders is credited with reviving Burlington, especially the Lake Champlain waterfront, and infusing the city’s pedestrian mall on Church Street with a progressive vibe.

“He took over the city and the Democrats stood back dumbfounded,” said Mark Wetmiller, a retired banker-turned-musician who watched in awe — and dismay, too, he conceded — as Sanders transformed his city. 

“They were developing this little utopian community,” Wetmiller said.

A Unitarian Universalist Church with a “Black Lives Matter” sign on its lawn towers over one end of Church Street. Near the other end, on the second floor of an office building, is Sanders’ presidential campaign headquarters where you can buy a T-shirt that proclaims: “College for all. Medicare for all. Jobs for all.”

Meet Kolby LaMarche

But Trump supporters are not to be outdone.

In their own twist of the unusual that seems to be ingrained in Burlington’s zeitgeist, the city’s Republican club recently chose a gay high school senior as its new party chair. 

Kolby LaMarche, who was just 17 when elected to the GOP post, initially supported Sanders’ presidential campaign. Now 18, he embraced Trump after sitting with his grandfather and watching one of the president's televised rallies.

“I originally supported Bernie simply because he’s Bernie and he’s from Vermont,” LaMarche said on a recent morning between classes at Vermont Community College in Winooski, a former factory town near Burlington where he takes advanced classes before his high school graduation next spring. 

“I started to watch Trump," LaMarche said, "and my mind started to toy around with my political beliefs. Finally I saw that Trump could be this figure of change and reform.”

LaMarche started talking to Trump supporters and discovered a kinship.

“The conversations felt better with me than they did with my liberal colleagues,” he said. “I felt more impassioned with the things the president was saying.”

One such issue that bothers him greatly, LaMarche said, is immigration — but not just the question of bolstering border security. 

If he could speak to Trump, LaMarche said he would encourage the president to develop programs for Latin America that would be patterned after the Marshall Plan that restored Europe’s economy after World War II. The goal, LaMarche said, would be to boost Latin America’s well-being and discourage migration to America.

If LaMarche has a problem with his new political allegiance, it’s with his sexual identity and how some conservative Republicans might view him.

“I am gay and I know I go against the national Republican platform and favor same-sex marriage,” he said. “I understand that people don’t get that yet. People should be able to love who they love.”

Still, even LaMarche and others says Republicans — especially Trump supporters — have a long way to go before they dominate Vermont politics.

Vermont voters have backed Democrats in every presidential election since 1992. The last Vermont Republican to win the state’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, Peter Smith, was elected in 1988, then voted out two years later after just one term. The last state Republican elected to the U.S. Senate, Jim Jeffords, ended up renouncing the GOP and declaring himself an independent in 2001.

“Hard-core conservatives have even less luck running for state offices,” said Garrison Nelson, a political science professor at the University of Vermont in Burlington.

As for Trump, Nelson predicts that the president will be “blown out again in November 2020” by Vermont’s progressive majority. Many anti-Trump voters, Nelson said, still angrily recall a rally at Burlington’s Flynn Theater in January 2016 when Trump told his supporters to take the coat of a heckler after he was removed and pushed into the winter's chill outside.

"Confiscate the coat," Trump said, according to news reports. "It’s about 10 degrees below freezing outside.”

On a recent weekday, the Flynn Theater was quiet. A worker atop a ladder was installing a sign on the theater’s marquee that advertised an upcoming performance of “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.”

Such holiday trappings mask occasional hostility and lingering distrust by many Trump supporters toward Vermont and its progressive tendencies.

Jay Shepard, a prominent Vermont Republican and member of the GOP's national committee, says he likes to wear his pro-Trump “Make America Great Again” baseball cap to most places he visits — except restaurants. When Shepard goes to a local café, he says he removes his hat before he walks in the door.

“I’m afraid of what they’ll do to my food,” Shepard said.

Another Trump supporter, Ed Daudelin, of Essex Junction, said he was thrown to the ground by an anti-Trump demonstrator during a confrontation last August at a Trump rally.

“Frankly, it pissed me off,” said Daudelin, 72, who fought in Vietnam with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division and then served 27 years as a full-time member of the Vermont National Guard.

"I get into plenty of arguments up here," he said. "I’m going to support the president. I like the way he talks. He’s talking my language. When he says he’s going to do something, he does it.”

Bret Powell, 72, a retired attorney from Williston, said he and his wife typically would remain quiet when friends would criticize Trump.

“They would start bashing Trump and they assume everyone feels the same way,” Powell said of his friends.

A turning point came, he said, when close friends announced they were going to a an anti-Trump rally in Burlington. Powell and his wife did not say anything, but afterwards vowed to not hold back their feelings any longer.

“I say to people that we support Trump,” Powell said. "Here’s a guy who’s talking to me.”

Perhaps the most famous confrontation between Trump supporters in Vermont and opponents occurred by a flagpole outside the home of Gus and Annmarie Klein on Burlington’s north side.

The Kleins displayed a pro-Trump flag on a flagpole atop a camper parked in their driveway. One Sunday, however, they awoke to find that someone had not only removed the flag but burned it, leaving the charred remains on their front porch. 

After the incident was publicized on local TV news and in the Burlington Free Press, Trump’s son, Eric, took to Twitter and send a message that he would be happy to send a new flag.

The problem is that the Kleins did not have a Twitter account.

The Kleins' phone started ringing with calls from the 202 area code — Washington, D.C. The calls were coming from Trump’s campaign headquarters in the capital. But they initially declined to answer. They said they were not familiar with the “202” area code and thought it might be a robocall.

The Kleins ultimately answered. The Trump campaign sent a new flag and an assortment of baseball caps that proclaimed Trump’s 2016 election slogan, “Make America Great Again,” and his 2020 message to “Keep America Great.”

"It was scary,” said Annmarie recently, as a new pro-Trump flag hung from the pole in her driveway. "In the state and city I lived in, I never pictured something like this. I love America, and I love the America I was brought up in.”

In her youth, Janet Metz might have protested against the flag that now flies over the Kleins' home. In 1972, Metz volunteered for George McGovern, the liberal Democratic presidential candidate who was beaten in a massive landslide by President Richard M. Nixon. 

Metz, who grew up on Long Island, considered herself a Democrat. After college, she took a job with a variety of New York politicians, eventually rising to become an administrator for the Democratically-controlled New York Assembly.

But as she grew older, Metz felt her politics changing. 

She was especially bothered by the Democrat’s wholehearted support for abortion — and the unwillingness of the party to allow Democrats who questioned any aspect of abortion to run for office.

Beginning with George W. Bush in 2000, Metz began to vote for Republicans in presidential elections. In 2012, she took time away from her job in Albany to volunteer for Mitt Romney’s campaign in the New Hampshire primary. 

Then, after retiring from her Democratic job, remarrying and moving to Vermont, she became a Republican.

In 2016, she came to admire Trump.

“He’s relentless," Metz said on a recent morning as she sat in a park in Burlington overlooking Lake Champlain. "Would I like him to not tweet so much? Absolutely. But I don’t think he’s done anything impeachable.”

Metz is not afraid to tell friends that she supports Trump.

“I love to shock people,” she said, adding that she especially loves how they often respond.

“They say, ‘Oh, you’re such a nice person.’ ”          

Mike Kelly is a columnist for the USA TODAY NETWORK. Email: kellym@northjersey.com Twitter: @mikekellycolumn