New Mass. GOP Chairman Robert Maginn has plans to increase his party’s share of members in the Massachusetts House to the point where they could sustain a veto without any help from Democrats.
It’s called “Project 54,” a reference to that magic number. Maginn, touting that the number of GOP reps doubled in the 2010, hopes to repeat that trick in 2012.
While he’s right that the number of GOP representatives increased from 16 to 33 in the last election, that doesn’t quite tell the whole story. As the graph illustrates,
the number of GOP reps has mostly hovered around 32 since 1978, when the State Constitution was amended to reduce the size of the House from 240 representatives to the present 160. The doubling of the GOP membership in 2010 essentially restored them to the mean over the past 34 years, after the drought years of 2002-2008, when their numbers dipped as low as 16.
Which brings us to the next point. Maginn is hoping that Mitt Romney will be Republican Presidential nominee and he believes that Romney’s candidacy will help the party meet its “Project 54” goal. And who was Governor for most of the time when the state GOP’s fortunes were at their lowest?
As they say in the private equity world, past performance is not a guarantee of future success.
LOL. I hope Maginn doesn’t get confused and max out to any Dems this year…
Great graph, great post.
I’ve started a local access cable TV show – one of my segments is going to be called “Every picture tells a story, don’t it?” after the Rod Stewart tune, I’m planning to put up charts and graphs that people need to see. This chart would be awesome, can I use it, and maybe interview you for the piece?
It indicates, for one thing, that the “doubling of GOP Reps!!!!” that occurred in 2010 was really just regression to the mean (as hesterprynne points out).
Until the MA Republicans actually break the mid-30s barrier, which this chart helpfully indicates they haven’t in a LONG time, then how could one say that they are anything more than utterly irrelevant in the Commonwealth.
could increase Republican membership in the MA House, but then again, how well did a Romney slate do when he was still acting as MA governor? The only Republican he managed to get elected was Scott Brown when he slid over from his House seat to a Senate seat when Cheryl Jacques departed. Other than that, Romney’s big show of running Larry, Curley, and Moe to Legislative seats resulted in a net loss of seats.
What I read into this chart (not from this chart alone, but from what I’ve observed from many other sources over the years) is support for the theory that the George W Bush presidency gave the Republican “brand” a very bad name in this state. Every election year when Bush was president – 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008 – Republicans lost house seats in MA, and that set of 4 elections is the dip we see in the chart. Of course by 2006 and 2008 that effect was being felt nationally, but in MA it started with the first election held during the Bush years.
In Massachusetts, there are some who vote Republican partially out of the desire to have two parties active in the government. That motivation weakens when we have a Republican governor and strengthens, as recently, when we have a Democratic governor.
That could also (somewhat) explain the long decline and the recent bump.
Yes, I know a number of Massachusetts voters who have voted for Republican Governors in the past because they felt the legislature was too Democratic-dominated and wanted “balance”. Besides, they say, the legislature controls everything. However:
1. While I’ve heard of this a lot in voting for Governor, I don’t remember ever hearing people talk about choosing their state rep or state senator in this way, as a counterbalance to the Governor.
2. We had Republican Governors from 1991 to 2007. On this chart you can see only a very mild drop in Republicans in the state house for the 1992 through 2000 elections, probably going along with the general trend of Massachusetts becoming gradually more Democratic over that time. They even had a bit of a recovery in the 2000 election – when we had a Republican Governor. It’s in 2002 that the precipitious drop begins – when we still had a Republican Governor – and 2010 that it ends.
Those were the years that people were out on sidewalks gathering signatures to vote on marriage and Tim Gill was engaged in his stealth campaign to replace traditional marriage incumbents with pro-ssm candidates. That was very successful:
marriage equality, but this claim–posted on Wikipedia–sounds like a classic case of self-congratulatory confusion of causation and correlation. There’s nothing there about shenanigans or stealth.