Eisenhower ran with incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon of California, while Stevenson's running mate was Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.

However Eisenhower's unique personal appeal brought even that region back into the GOP coalition, and allowed him to break 70% in the state in both 1952 and 1956 (where Eisenhower had performed better than he did in 1952), the first Republican to do so since Calvin Coolidge in 1924, and the last Republican to date.

In three counties Eisenhower even broke eighty percent of the vote, which, as of 2024, no other candidate has managed to do since.

No presidential candidate since has surpassed Eisenhower's 72.16% vote share or his 44.35% margin of victory, as by the late 1950s cracks were already beginning to form in the Republican stranglehold on Vermont, and the GOP shifted toward an increasingly Southern and conservative party beginning in the 1960s.

Even as Eisenhower won a decisive re-election landslide nationally, Vermont weighed in as a whopping 29% more Republican than the national average, making Vermont the most Republican state in the union in the 1956 election.