Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Yankee Republicans Bolt the GOP

By

The Saltonstall, Lodge, Phillips, Peabodys and Hatch’s of the Massachusetts Republican Party have probably been voting Democratic in the privacy of the voting booth for years.

But now the bloodlines that drove the moral conscience of our country since the Pilgrims (with good and bad outcomes), can not take the corrupt, mean-spirited GOP of today.

To them I say, welcome back to the “right” side of the political spectrum.

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  1. A sort of letter of resignation from the GOP by Christian columnist and author Frank Schaeffer.  His web site says he lives near Boston, although he’s been all over.

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    Then there are those who cling to family tradition.  If Lincoln Chafee had been able to make the switch, he’d probably be a lot happier right now.

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    p>  – Dan

  2. From the Globe:

    GOP ranks dropped by 31,000 since state elected Romney
    By Andrew Ryan, Globe Correspondent

    The number of registered Republicans in Massachusetts fell by almost 1,000 in the seven weeks since the primary, dropping the GOP’s already scant numbers in the heavily Democratic state to its lowest point in six years, according to a count released today of voters eligible to cast ballots in Tuesday’s election.

    As the party struggles to hold onto to the governor’s office they have held for 16 years, their numbers dipped by about 0.1 percent, which means they now make up 12.5 percent of the state’s voters, according to the data released by the Secretary of State’s office. Since the state elected Republican Mitt Romney in 2002, the GOP has lost more than 31,000, or about or 6 percent, of its registered members.

    Democrats, however, have gained about 30,000 new faces in the last four years, inflating their numbers by 2 percent. In the seven weeks since the primary, the party added 19,000 members, giving them almost 37 percent of the state’s registered voters.

    • What’s that, Lieutenant Governor?  What were you saying last night about the dangers of a one-party state?  You know, you’re right, that does sound pretty bad (and after all, look what the unified Federal government has gotten us into).  So your administration probably tried hard to strengthen the Republican party in Massachusetts from the ground up, right?

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      I’m sorry, I can’t hear you.  What was that?  Oh, in the four years you and Governor Landslide have been in office, Republican enrollment has dropped sharply while Democratic enrollment has risen?

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      Huh.

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      Yep, the Massachusetts Republican party sure must be glad you two have been there trying hard to keep us from being a one-party state.

  3. Sorry, didn’t notice your diary on this article before I posted mine.  The challenge now is to embrace and expand this exodus of “good” Republicans.

  4. From Reuters:

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    In Kansas, 9 former Republicans run as Democrats

    A mini-rebellion is under way in an American Heartland state so historically unswingable that neither national party typically spends much time or energy stumping for candidates.

    But this year President George W. Bush, the country’s leading Republican, is making a last-minute campaign stop in Kansas, where at least nine candidates running on the November 7 ballot are Republicans-turned-Democrats. They include a veteran county prosecutor seeking to unseat the Republican attorney general and a former state Republican Party chairman running as the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor.

    […]

    “The Republican Party got focused on some issues that really have nothing to do with people’s daily lives … I just could not continue to work with the conservative Republicans that were running the state party,” said Mark Parkinson, candidate for lieutenant governor.

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    The Democratic tide is rising –rapidly…

  6. I think that this is a very symbolic moment — and rather sad, in a way.

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    These families are emblematic of the history of the Massachusetts Republican Party going back to the Civil War. They were vertebrae in the backbone of the national GOP through the 1960s. There certainly were wayward sheep who rebelled against their families’ politics, and the rise of the Southern white Republican party, Vietnam, and Nixon arguably was the beginning of the end of broad party loyalty (Archie Cox, after all, was a good WASP-y sort who stood up for principal over party). But for the son of Leverett Saltonstall — surely THE ur-Brahmin  — to go beyond leaving the ancestral party and join the opposition is surely a sign that the connection between class and party has been severed for good.

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    What makes me sad is that these folks — who have such a strong tradition of public service — feel that they have to leave the party that their ancestors founded and ran. Publically repudiating tradition could not have been easy, even if they may have been feeling that their party left them a while ago.

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    As a Democrat, I look forward to their contributions of integrity and intellectual energy to our efforts to restore what is great about this Commonwealth under a new administration.

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