"If he managed to turn around the moribund MA GOP and put the state back on the path to a competitive 2-party system, he would have accomplished a monumental task right there, but he hasn't."
I don't think that the Governor really has much power in that regard, unless he is phenominally popular (which William Weld was, but Mitt Romney never achieved that kind of popularity). The demographics make two-party parity there virtually impossible.
Party-building is a Governor's premier issue as head of the state party, and whether the numbers rise or fall is usually a sign of their effectiveness. I was not expecting Romney to register some mass turn-around, since that would take an act of God, but a nice modest one would've been a positive sign. The party has been in free-fall since Weld's first election. On the federal level, there were roughly 4 districts in the '90s that were potentially competitive (2 of which we outright won), and now we're competitive in zero. Legislatively, in the Senate, we were 5 seats short of a majority. Now we're only a similar number of seats away from zero.
I don't believe it's an impossibility for rebuilding the Republican Party in MA, or any state where we're down, for that matter, as long as you have the right people willing to do the hard work to make that a reality. It won't happen in a cycle or two, but over a period of time. The key is working right down to the grass roots and getting rid of those individuals that keep the growth and expansion from happening. It's funny that elected MA Republicans, often quite liberal, are almost like inner-city Black Democrats that cling to a dying and rotting constituency. At least the urban Democrats will employ demogoguery to keep their power, the Republicans in these areas have nothing to fall back on, and virtually hand the 'Rats these seats on a silver platter when they die off or retire one by one. I seemed to notice a pattern that virtually every single solitary House seat in the state that was occupied by the GOP Minority Leader in the past 35 years (going back to Frank Hatch) seems to now have a Democrat in it today. Rather telling, to say the least.