I think though that starting with the New Deal era the Democrats were by and large the more left-leaning party as they absorbed all of the progressives and the south was more of a political outlier then anything, though southern Democrats were pretty divided on economic issues.
As for Vermont, my grandmother is a native Vermonter and a lifelong Republican and I think that there political culture was conservative in the same way that the great plains states were and just changed not so much due to the GOP moving right but because of hippies moving there. Maybe in another timeline Kansas would have become liberal if a bunch of hippie farmers had moved there and Kansas City and Topeka became counter-cultural meccas.
Man, I wish that had happened to Kansas
