Today's Globe had a story about the vanishing New England moderate Republican --
Even in MA, GOP politics are all about trump.
They are an increasingly marginalized breed in Texas and Florida. They haven’t made it to the front of the presidential pack in a decade. And even in Massachusetts, once a cradle of Rockefeller Republicanism, the moderate GOP teeters on the brink of extinction: most of the party’s candidates for statewide office this year revere Donald Trump and reject the politics of retiring Governor Charlie Baker.
At the Massachusetts GOP’s convention two weekends ago, speakers falsely claimed that the 2020 election was “stolen,” labeled Democrats “evil,” and reprised a 2016 greatest hit, chanting “Lock her up! Lock her up!” at the mention of Hillary Clinton. Baker, the party’s top elected official and one of the nation’s most popular governors, was present only on the back of candy wrappers, sporting a red clown nose under mocking valediction: “Adiόs, Chuckles.” Rayla Campbell, the GOP’s candidate for secretary of state, baselessly warned the crowd that public schools are instructing 5-year-olds to perform oral sex on each other. (Many fellow Republicans disavowed her vulgarity, but backed up the sentiment.)
That rhetoric is easy to dismiss as irrelevant in a reliably blue state where those extreme voices are unlikely to win elected office. But the hard-right turn the party has taken nonetheless signals the continued decline of the moderate New England Republican, long popular here for conservative fiscal policy, a hands-off approach to social issues, and as a counterbalance to a Democratic-dominated Legislature.
...
on social issues, Democrats enjoy a major edge over Republicans in Massachusetts. Seventy-four percent of Massachusetts adults believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases, polling has shown, and 98 percent of registered voters support background checks for anyone who buys a gun. The state GOP’s leadership vehemently opposes abortion, and the candidate the party endorsed for governor, Geoff Diehl, has in the past earned support from the National Rifle Association.
Trump won roughly 32 percent of the vote in Massachusetts in 2020 and 2016, less than Mitt Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008.
But you would not have known it from the crowd at the MassGOP convention, where Trump was a particularly animating force, even if not all delegates were blindly loyal to the former president.
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Some Republican strategists caution against overinterpreting the rhetoric of the state party convention. It’s common for such events to draw the most extreme members of any party: It’s the most dedicated activists who are willing to spend on tickets and travel and devote their sunny spring weekends to debates on political endorsements and party platform planks. The positions of those party faithful do not necessarily represent the average party voter, some analysts point out.
“The state party convention is inside, inside, inside, inside baseball…. That is not the new Republican party,” said Jennifer Nassour, a former chair of the MassGOP. “The Republican Party is the one that believes in fiscal conservatism, the one that believes that the next governor should carry on the same messaging that Governor Baker has.”
Fewer than 10% of Mass. voters are registered Republicans, and outside of the governor's office the GOP has next-to-no presence in state government, so they can't do much worse by going all trumpy. It's still disheartening to see the last bastion of rational Republicanism fall to the wingnuts.
