Vermonters are, according to a recent study, the healthiest people in America. By most measurements they are also among the best educated, the most socially responsible, and unusually sophisticated. Where else is it generally understood that French fries are better when made with unpeeled potatoes?

So why are Vermonters politically backward?

Not the elected officials. With the inevitable few exceptions, they seem capable. For instance, in the highly unlikely event that any Vermont governor thought of selling to the highest bidder an appointment to the U.S. Senate, that governor would know better than to discuss those intentions over the telephone, a bit of common sense which apparently does not extend to Illinois.

No, we’re talking here about the folks. Regular citizens. Voters, or The Electorate as the boys in academe like to call them. They are un-informed, or perhaps more accurately, ill-informed. It leads to some strange behavior.

A bit of this behavior comes from Republicans. Just a few days before the election, a few Vermont Republicans were still hoping that the impending “revelation” that former Weatherman Bill Ayers had actually written Barack Obama’s first book (which of course he had not) would yet cost Obama the state’s three electoral votes.

But this being primarily a Democratic state and a liberal one, most evidence of Vermont’s lack of political sophistication comes from Democrats, and especially from their left flank, abetted by followers of the Progressive Party.

By reliable report, some active Vermont Democrats are furious at their party because it does not insist on impeaching President George W. Bush. Yes, even now, with less than 40 days to go before Bush shuffles off to Dallas, with zero evidence that many Americans care any more, these Democrats will not rest until their party leaders prepare articles of impeachment.

But by far the most obvious example of political naiveté was the regular drumbeat of suggestion last spring and summer that perhaps the Democratic Party should not bother to field a candidate for governor. The Democrats could leave that line vacant, said many a political activist, blogger, letter-to-the-editor-writer, and armchair strategist, giving Progressive Party leader Anthony Pollina the chance to go “one-on-one” against incumbent Republican Gov. Jim Douglas.

Hello! Earth to Vermont? That’s what state political parties do. They run candidates for governor. Not running a candidate for governor is something a major political party simply does not do. At least not since the bad old days of the segregated, one-party South when a Republican candidate for governor might have been defenestrated by the Ku Klux Klan, probably not the model Vermont wants to emulate.

Since 1968 (and I am indebted for this information to Dartmouth College Government professor Richard F. Winters, who went to more trouble than necessary to help me out), only once in more than 520 gubernatorial elections has there not been a Democratic candidate. That was in Virginia in 1976, during the death throes of the odious Byrd machine. What remained of its leadership could not abide the populist, integrationist, Henry Howell, the state’s most popular Democrat, so they endorsed one of their own, Mills Godwin, who had become a Republican. Howell ran as an independent and lost the general election to Godwin.

Since then, a Democrat has run for governor every election in every state. It’s not optional. The national Democratic leadership would not allow it.

“We would work with the state party,” said Brian Namey, the press secretary for the National Governor’s Association in Washington. “We would help them find a good candidate.”

In short,  There will be a candidate on the Democratic line.

There is no point in discussing this any further. There will be such a candidate, in 2010 and 2012 and beyond. Because this is not a party registration state and no one is technically a “member” of any political party, that Democratic candidate could be anyone. You, for instance. Or, just to pick a name out of the blue, Anthony Pollina.

But perhaps you or Pollina might be challenged in the primary. To win it, you or he would be well advised to pledge to support whoever did win it. Pollina was apparently unwilling to make that pledge earlier this year.

As long as another candidate who is left of center—or even left of right—insists on running for governor as an independent or Progressive, any acceptable Republican will win. Having no Democratic candidate will not happen. It makes no difference whether it should happen. It won’t.

Leaving us with the mystery of why some Vermonters can’t get this through their thick skulls. Some might be confused because the Democrats did agree in 2006 not to field a Senate candidate against Bernie Sanders. But Sanders is a political force of nature in Vermont. Pollina is not. Besides, Sanders was “merely” running for the U.S., Senate. For state parties, governor is the most important office.

But there is another reason many Vermonters are politically under-educated: They have fewer instructors. Vermont voters are like students in a school in which 40 percent of the faculty has been laid off. The teachers still on the job are too over-worked to manage anything but the basics That’s because the state’s new organizations have cut way back on covering politics and state government.

Details tomorrow.—-Jon Margolis