New Hampshire puts “Live Free or Die” on its license plates. Vermont’s motto is “Freedom and Unity.”
Brian Porto expected the slogans to be mostly branding. Instead, “I was surprised at how accurate I concluded it was,” said Porto, a professor emeritus at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Free Staters came to New Hampshire looking for the smallest government and lowest taxes. “When you put a big sign [that] says ‘Live Free or Die,’ that’s probably who you’re going to get,” Porto said. In his new book, he calls the state’s license plates “ubiquitous mobile billboards for a libertarian ethic.”
Vermont’s motto asks for something different, Porto says: “We want to give you freedom to be yourself, but by the same token, we want you to be part of the community.”
Porto spent four years writing “Twin States, Different Paths: The Politics of New Hampshire and Vermont,” which the University of Massachusetts Press published Thursday.
The book argues the two states are “fraternal, not identical” twins. They look nearly the same on a map but differ sharply in how they view government. In the preface, Porto writes that he hopes to “lend a bit of academic rigor to a favorite topic of dinner-party conversation.”
His explanation starts in the dirt, and what he called “a long attenuated process.”
“New Hampshire got cheated when it came to soil,” he said. “It’s the Granite State for a good reason.”
By the mid-1800s, families were abandoning New Hampshire’s rocky farms. “The boys typically went west to find better land, and their sisters went south to work in the mills, either in Nashua or Manchester or Lowell, Massachusetts,” Porto said. Vermont’s richer soil kept it a farm state much longer, while New Hampshire turned its rivers into power for mills along the Merrimack.
That split shaped how each state marketed itself. Vermont set up the nation’s first state publicity service in 1891 and sold itself, in Porto’s words, as “a quiet pastoral place to read and think and paint.” New Hampshire advertised its low property taxes, golf courses and horse racing track.
“Vermont tends to push what it has, which is beautiful scenery, small towns,” Porto said. “New Hampshire tends to push what it doesn’t have, which is taxes.”
Vermont has banned billboards since the 1960s. “Billboards or the lack thereof are a marvelous reflection of the two cultures,” Porto said.
“A large part of what Act 250 has tried to preserve is the traditional Vermont town,” he said: buildings clustered in the village, surrounded by farm fields and forest. On the New Hampshire side of the river, “it’s much easier to build things.”
Vermont’s pitch drew newcomers who helped move the state to the left starting in the 1950s, Porto said.
“If you really wanted to get back to the land, you went to Vermont rather than to New Hampshire,” he said.
The book lays out a short political history of each state. It then profiles New Hampshire as “the individualistic twin” and Vermont as “the community-minded twin.” Porto tests the theory on two policy fights: land use — closely tied to housing — and school finance.
He said housing made a good case because “things can be different without being starkly different.” School funding is the opposite.
In 1997, both states’ supreme courts found their school funding systems unconstitutional. Vermont passed Act 60 within months, and the state’s share of school costs jumped from about 25% to 84%.
New Hampshire’s share, 8% at the time, has since climbed to about 28%, still the lowest in the country, Porto writes. Last year, the state Supreme Court again found New Hampshire’s school funding unconstitutionally low. When a school funding case recently reached the court, 30 Republican lawmakers filed a brief asking the justices to overturn the Claremont decisions, and House Republicans later made their own attempt to challenge the rulings.
“It’s hard not to see this as shooting the messenger,” Porto said.
Housing follows the same pattern, just less dramatically. Vermont has Act 250, its statewide land-use law. Its 2023 HOME Act ended single-family-only zoning where towns have municipal water and sewer. New Hampshire has pushed towns to allow more multifamily housing but leaves the final say local.
Porto traces that to a distrust of central power going back to colonial days. Vermont, he said, has “a much more trusting attitude generally toward government and willingness to let government experiment.”
He doesn’t rank the two. “I didn’t want to say this is good and this is bad,” Porto said. “Here’s why they’re different. That was my main concern.”
Porto grew up in Yonkers, New York. He clerked at the New Hampshire Supreme Court in 1987 and 1988, worked for the New Hampshire Senate and has lived in Vermont since 1990. For about 25 years, he clipped Valley News stories and nonprofit reports comparing the two states.
“I saved it for my retirement,” he said.
He retired in 2022 and spent the first year of work on the book just reading each state’s history.
Porto ends the book with an open question: whether, facing demographic and economic pressures, the Twin States “remain fraternal or become more alike.”
He returned to that question throughout an interview, describing each state as being tested on the very trait that defines it.
“Can New Hampshire continue to be as tight with a buck as it has, and not suffer from that?” he said. For Vermont, it’s the reverse: “Can it continue to fund programs very generously without alienating a significant chunk of its population?”
Vermont has already run into that limit. Act 181, the 2024 land-use law, included a rule requiring Act 250 review for private roads longer than 800 feet in much of the state. It drew an outcry from rural landowners, and lawmakers rolled it back this spring.
“Those of us who have a lot of formal education and think we know best maybe don’t know the lives of other people,” Porto said, “and we certainly ought to talk to them before we try to impose this sort of thing.”
New Hampshire is changing too. Being a conservative in the state traditionally meant being an economic conservative, Porto said, not a social one. Now, “that socially conservative stuff is starting to creep into New Hampshire politics, at least in terms of bills being introduced.”
He said Vermont’s race for governor this fall is also “largely about” that tension.
“You’re always looking for that balance between spending enough and being aggressive enough to meet problems, without causing a revolt, where people [are] saying, ‘I can’t afford to live here anymore,'” he said.
“Twin States, Different Paths” will be available as of Sept. 24 from the University of Massachusetts Press.