A voter takes their completed ballot to a voting machine in Montpelier on Election Day, November 8, 2022. File photo by Glenn Russell/VTDiggerAmy Shollenberger has knocked doors for candidates in Vermont elections for years. But this fall, she decided to get involved in national campaigning — and to do so in a state in which, she said, her support for Democratic candidates could go a lot further. That brought Shollenberger, a veteran Statehouse lobbyist who lives in Barre, to the battleground state of Wisconsin for a week in late September and early October. There, she led a group of about a dozen other Vermonters to knock on doors to drum up support for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s Democratic bids for president and vice president, respectively.“It was the first time I’d traveled to another state to do canvassing,” Shollenberger said. As for why, she said, “this election is, really, determining what the future is going to look like for people — in a way that I haven’t seen, or haven’t been aware of, in my lifetime.”Shollenberger isn’t the only one. With Democrats and Republicans locked in extremely close races to control the White House and both houses of Congress, some Vermonters are taking their activism to states in which their efforts may well have a bigger impact.There is expected to be little competition in Vermont’s statewide races this year, though party leaders have focused on a handful of state Senate races in which the state GOP believes it has a shot at chipping away at Democrats’ supermajority in that chamber.“We’re the most reliable blue state in the nation,” said Elizabeth Allen-Pennebaker of Burlington, speaking on the phone Monday from Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley — a region, in a key swing state, that is hotly contested by both major parties’ presidential campaigns. Allen-Pennebaker planned to knock on doors for Harris and Walz that afternoon.As Allen-Pennebaker sees it, she said, if Vermonters “want to make a difference, you’ve got to go somewhere else.” Amy Shollenberger of Barre poses for a selfie with a voter while canvassing for Democratic candidates in Wisconsin. Photo courtesy of Amy ShollenbergerIn 2020, Vermont gave Democratic President Joe Biden his highest margin of victory of any state — about 66% to about 30% for Republican nominee Donald Trump. (Only Washington, D.C., gave Biden a greater margin of victory in that year’s election.)And in this year’s election cycle, federal campaign finance data shows that — just like in the months leading up to the 2020 election — Vermonters are supporting federal Democratic candidates, over Republicans, at the highest rate in the country.  According to the election transparency nonprofit OpenSecrets, more than 81% of Vermonters’ donations to national-level candidates and political parties so far this cycle have benefited Democrats, while only about 13% have benefited the GOP.To be sure, Vermont donors play a much smaller role on the national stage, overall, than those in most other states. On a per capita basis, donors from the state have so far spent $16 per Vermonter on federal campaigns — compared to a national average of $23 per person, according to a VTDigger analysis of OpenSecrets’ data. At the same time, support for Democrats — or Democratic-leaning political action committees — is clear even among the state’s donors with the deepest pockets. In some cases, Vermonters are donating to federal Democratic candidates running for office in larger, more competitive states, federal campaign finance data shows. In 2023 and 2024 so far, out of all Vermonters’ federal campaign donations totaling $10,000 or greater, VTDigger found that about 85% have gone to political committees aligned with Harris’ campaign or that support Democratic candidates for the U.S. House or Senate, including in the swing states of Michigan, Arizona and North Carolina. Only about 12% of those largest donations went to committees aligned with Republicans, including Trump and former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who endorsed Trump after dropping out of the race in August. Paul Dame, chair of the Vermont GOP, said in a text message that many local Republicans are focused on local races and are “less concerned” about federal ones. He said he didn’t know of any local Republicans traveling out of state to canvas.  Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, some local candidates themselves have gotten involved in the out-of-state campaign effort. One of them, state Rep. Kathleen James, D-Manchester, also traveled to eastern Pennsylvania, where she canvassed for Democratic candidates in that state alongside her wife, Alex Heintz.James, who is running for reelection in a contested race in the Bennington-4 district, said she was motivated to get involved in national politics after Trump was elected president in 2016. Some eight years later, when looking for ways to volunteer on the campaign trail, she said she saw more opportunities, in more states beyond New England, than ever before.Both James and Shollenberger said they traveled out of state with a nonprofit called Seed the Vote, which recruits volunteers to canvas for left-leaning candidates in highly competitive parts of the country. “I was impressed,” James said, “at how easy it was to find, and still is to find, all kinds of ways to get out of our state — and go make a difference in battleground states.”Erin Petenko contributed reporting.Read the story on VTDigger here: As election nears, some Vermonters are hitting the trail in swing states.