Massachusetts was the only state to vote for McGovern in 1972. They went for Reagan twice, but that was their only speck of sanity.
But Reagan was a Democrat before he was a Republican.
I've lived in the Northeast my whole life, and I lived in MA for 22 years, and in a liberal hellhole, at that.
Even in MA, there are tons of conservatives. All of them are registered Democrats, but they're conservatives, none the less.
Reagan appealed to them because he WASN'T a Republican. Oh, yes, he was running as a Republican, but he wasn't born Republican.
And there were many other things that made him different from the species Republicanus newenglandensis.
He didn't look down his nose at them.
He didn't care that they smoked.
He disn't care if they had a few drinks (He won Massachusetts the day he visited the Erie Pub in Dorchester and hoisted a few, no Republican has done that before or since).
He didn't care that their children didn't dress up for church, or what parties they went to.
He even knew that people occasionally let fly a few curse words, and he didn't hold that against them.
None of the born Republicans that these people knew were ever like that. And very few of them are like that today.