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There are two kinds of people in Burlington, Vermont: those who believe there are no Hillary supporters here, and those who believe there must be, somewhere, but that they’re all in hiding.

Inside Dobra Tea Parlor yesterday, incense was burning at the foot of a bronze bodhisattva. Two customers were drinking tea and writing somberly in their journals. In a corner, a pair of young women discussed alternative high schools. I leaned across the counter and asked, softly, where I might be able to find someone who was voting for Clinton.

The tea barista, Sam Hughes, looked shocked. “I don’t know anyone who would admit to being a Hillary supporter,” the 25-year-old told me, as I paid for a gluten-free tea cake.

“He’s started a revolution for sure,” said Burlington resident Molly Rhoads, 24, who recently got a free Bernie tattoo from a local tattoo parlor. Photograph: Lois Beckett/The Guardian

Burlington is where Bernie started his political career, as a socialist mayor who wrote strongly worded dispatches to world leaders about the importance of military disarmament, and it’s still his home base. In the downtown shopping district, where insistent classical music is piped out over the street, passers-by laughed or stared when I asked about Hillary Clinton. Where could I find a Hillary supporter? “Try Georgia,” said a white-bearded man in a fleece vest.

In The Bern Gallery, a smoke shop that had not been named in honor of the Vermont senator, 24-year-old Molly Rhoads shook her head. She pulled up her sleeve to bare her elbow, which sported a Bernie tattoo. She had gotten it at a local parlor that has been giving away free tattoos in support of the candidate. “He has started a revolution for sure,” she said.

Several Burlingtonians told me they believed local Hillary supporters existed. They just didn’t know where to find them.

Outside of city hall, I thought I had finally struck gold. Seventy-six-year-old Sunny Long told me she was a Hillary supporter. “We all love Bernie, but we think Clinton has the global experience that’s lacking in Bernie,” she said.

I asked her how long she had lived in Burlington. “Ten days,” she said. She had just moved here from Florida.

Feeling discouraged, I headed to the town’s independent bookstore, the Phoenix. Maybe the booksellers would have a deeper network of sources. At first, Phil Clingenpeel was stumped. By a Hillary supporter, he asked, did I mean someone who liked Hillary, or someone who supports her more than Bernie?

The latter, I told him.

He thought for a while. He did know someone who knew someone who supported Hillary, but he wasn’t sure if that person actually lived in Burlington. His coworker had a better idea: she had a friend who had actually hosted a Hillary event at his house last week.

“I’ve sort of come out of the closet, as it were, within the past month,” Nate Orshan told me, when I drove out to the renovated woolen mill where he works to interview him.

Orshan, 48, is a web analyst who has lived in Burlington most of his life. “I think I’ve voted for [Bernie] every singe election I could up until now,” he said.

Being a Hillary supporter here is “tough,” he told me. “Sometimes I feel like that boy in the story, ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes.’” There’s a lot of love for Bernie, and and I understand it, and I feel it, too…I just feel that he doesn’t have the support nationally that he’s going to need.”

Many Bernie supporters, he said, “fail to see that a lot of the country is indeed very conservative, and, in fact, very religious. It’s not a question of his Judaism, it’s a question of his secularism, that I think is going to be such a nonstarter for so many voters across the country.”

Orshan promised to put me in touch with his small network of local Hillary fans.

A window display in downtown Burlington, Vermont on Monday night. Photograph: Lois Beckett/The Guardian

Burlington is “a lonely place” for them right now, his friend Mattison told me, when I met her later that afternoon at a local brewery.

“It’s interesting, being out, having friends who aren’t, who are closeted Hillary supporters, who will message me on Facebook, or text me or email me, to say, ‘Thank you.’ Well, yeah, we have to speak up.”

The 50-year-old believes Hillary is the politician who will actually be able to move a progressive agenda forward.

“Change in this country is not revolution, it’s evolution,” said Mattison, a long-time Burlington resident and Hillary Clinton supporter. Photograph: Lois Beckett/THE GUARDIAN

Bernie “definitely speaks to the truth that the system is rigged, but I also think the truth of the matter is, Vermont is a very special place, and Bernie has never had to work through complicated changes in a complicated political sphere,” she said.

“When you see the people who are coming to [Trump’s] rallies, and the things that they’re saying—that’s the real America.”

While she loves living here, she said, “I know it’s not real.”