Unfortunately, the breed of Republicans in MA changed over time. Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. was a stalwart Conservative. When HCL, Jr., his grandson, was elected 12 years after Sr’s death, he was a solid liberal. Add to that the bad taste Catholics had to the MA GOP and you had a long-term disaster in the making. JFK was, of course, to the right of Lodge, Jr. when he defeated him in 1952, but the national trend of the Democrats was leftward, and so that was where he went in rapid order.
The young college liberals did a clean-out/purge of the Democrats, replacing the calcified old-timer Conservatives by the ‘70s, while the Republicans had nowhere near such a movement (which was piecemeal at best), and what accounted for the near-total collapse of the MA GOP presence in the legislature was that the young Dems were able to pick off so many open/retiring GOP seats (partly due to the increase of Catholic Dem voters, and partly due to the GOP being so statist and lacking for that active grassroots movement).
So many of those Republicans were almost ideologically carbon-copies of the Democrats, but ran as “pedigreed” types, that arrogant sense that they were the only ones who should “rule” over the Dem rabble. No wonder so many were shown the door (with Weld being an exception, a snobbish Brahmin). The MA GOP never got the remake/revitalization (or a gigantic enema) it should’ve received back in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
It’s too bad that in the ‘80s, the MA GOP utterly failed to harness the national energy to reboot the party using the Reagan voters, but everything up there was so messed up. It was the Brahmin liberal RINOs who had more in common with Carter/Mondale (Weld and Slick Willard, who wasn’t even a Republican by his own admittance), while the Democrat Governor Ed King was far closer to the Conservative GOP model. It was no wonder with the bad guys in charge of the GOP that they ended up where they are today, and still remain (and then you have these types like Charlie Baker and Scott Brown who seem like they can’t get far-left enough fast enough and act as though they’re reformers). MA is ripe for change, but as long as there is no viable alternative with the GOP, those people have nowhere to go.
FMDJ,
As usual your post is chock full of great factual and historic information, but I'm going to have to disagree with you on this.
There were many good, conservative candidates that ran last November in MA. Like I've posted scores of times, folks like Sean Bielat against Bwaney, Karyn Polito for MA Treasurer and Mary Connaughton for MA Auditor and they all lost soundly.
These are good people and were fine, fine conservative candidates who ran in spite of a MA GOP that makes the architect who came out with “New Coke” look like a genius.
The problem is too many people here are on the dole; it's a symbol of systemic failure in nearly all "Blue" states. The leaches will vote themselves "Bread and Circuses" until they collapse. The sane producers are hopelessly outnumbered, period.