Vermont’s population declined by 0.03 percent between 2023 and 2024. That’s 215 fewer people. About the same number of homeless people that were reported added in New Hampshire in the same period – an anecdotal observation with no connection, but a reader saw the decline on the Vermont side and wondered if it might be a sign that folks are sick (and tired!) of the Demorrhoid, Proglodyte, and Hypocrat nonsense poisoning a once great state.
November 5th, 2024, showed us some of that weariness. Vermonters ended the Democratic legislative supermajority. Governor Phil Scott, as moderate a New England Republican as you will find, was handed another term and his veto power back.
The state might still have toes on the ledge, but it was not yet ready to turn the entire state into Burlington, with a nod to try to roll some of the nuttiness back. Oh, and 215 people left Vermont.
You will find more infographics at Statista
The data comes to us from Statista, an outfit that crunches data and then creates cute pictures of it meant for public consumption. The partisan cave paintings of the digital era. New York and California appear more attractive because their state populations have grown. Popular welfare destinations for domestic grifters and illegal aliens, but that is peddled as a net positive. Look, more people! They must be doing something right.
Building bigger troughs for the pigs to feed is not evidence of a better place to live, but it begs questions about Vermont’s tiny decline. The Green Mountain state is as blue as either New York or California. High taxes, unnecessary meddling by a regulatory state, and lots of welfare. It is a sanctuary state filled with sanctuary towns, rising crime and drug use, and in some cases, legal sex work (the work isn’t legal, but it is illegal to arrest you for it).
On its surface, Vermont’s high taxes and the regulatory mess, led by the climate nonsense that could drive energy prices through the roof, are discouraging. If that isn’t cleared up, decline will set in, but I’m not ready to say the 2024 numbers are meaningful. If you look at the last ten years, there’s a big jump from the census, but every other year is plus or minus fractions of a percent.
| 2015 | 625,810 | 117 | 0.02% |
| 2016 | 624,366 | -1,444 | -0.23% |
| 2017 | 625,132 | 766 | 0.12% |
| 2018 | 624,802 | -330 | -0.05% |
| 2019 | 624,046 | -756 | -0.12% |
| 2020 | 642,977 | 18,931 | 3.03% |
| 2021 | 647,210 | 4,233 | 0.66% |
| 2022 | 648,142 | 932 | 0.14% |
| 2023 | 648,708 | 566 | 0.09% |
| 2024 | 648,493 | -215 | -0.03% |
Vermont has never had a significant growth year this century, but it grew manually until 2012. That was when the up-and-down game with the census correction being the only strong signal of growth, and we can’t say what that is, but lots of states have them. And many of them are immigrant spikes, legal or otherwise.
Pandemic policy can also be blamed for some of the domestic migration. Many people got the hell out of urban sprawls like NYC and Boston. They fled public health tyranny, the illegal invasion, and rising crime. The result was spikes in states like Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine as people with businesses or jobs in the northeast realized they could work from home, far away from the chaos they’d abetted by years of voting for Democrats or just putting up with them.
That infection typically follows most of them, and time will tell if the poison takes root in the Granite State. New Hampshire, unlike Vermont, has had continuous steady growth, including a spike in 2020 (census) and a larger-than-average increase in 2021.
| 2015 | 1,337,480 | 3,223 | 0.24% |
| 2016 | 1,343,694 | 6,214 | 0.46% |
| 2017 | 1,350,395 | 6,701 | 0.50% |
| 2018 | 1,355,064 | 4,669 | 0.35% |
| 2019 | 1,360,783 | 5,719 | 0.42% |
| 2020 | 1,378,756 | 17,973 | 1.32% |
| 2021 | 1,387,677 | 8,921 | 0.65% |
| 2022 | 1,396,678 | 9,001 | 0.65% |
| 2023 | 1,402,199 | 5,521 | 0.40% |
| 2024 | 1,409,032 | 6,833 | 0.49% |
The only population decline New Hampshire has shown since 2000 is in 2010, when that census showed a population drop of 11,981 (0.91%). Most years, it adds 5-6K new residents. A strong indication that its economic and regulatory policy is more appealing.
Perhaps Vermont doesn’t want the growth that could ruin the rural culture, but then why keep electing Democrats? They hate farmers and affordable living and prefer ideas like 15-minute cities. They want to sequester the land away, but for wind and solar farms, not exactly bucolic. And someone will have to explain how you can have a housing crisis given a stagnating or barely growing population of quickly aging farmers being replaced by immigrant gangs, sex traffickers, and the homeless, who can have the cities as long as they leave the gentrified elite alone.
