Why the Democrats Rule the State

By almost any measure, the last decade for the Massachusetts Republican Party has began disaster. To wit:

* No Republican has been elected to major at wide office in 12 years.

* Only one of the state's 11 Congressmen, Rep Silvio O. Conte (R-Pittsfield) is a Republican. With two exceptions, no Republican has won a Congressional election in the state for nearly a decade.

* Only seven members of the 40-member Smith Senate are Republicans.

* Only 29 of the 140 representatives in the State House of Representatives are Republicans.

* In the state primary two years ago, according to election records, 1,211,217 Democrats voted, compared with 190.879 Republicans, a more than six-to-one ratio. In Cambridge, Democratic registration has out numbered Republican registration by eight to-one.

* A current Republican candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives is running because she answered an ad in the local paper asking for candidates.

The Republican lot has not always been such a sorry one. Republican governors ruled the state for the decade before Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, running on a fiscal austerity, no-taxes platform, won Beacon Hill for the Democrats.

Earlier in the century, the state was heavily Republican, voting for the GOP through 1928. In 1924, the state offered up the Republican's Republican. Calvin Coolidge. As the largely Irish Democrats gained strength from the first Irish Catholic Presidential candidate, Al Smith in 1928, and the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the two parties fought to a stalemate in the state through the fifties.

"There are little old ladies in Do 'chester to worship Ronald Reagan, but who will not state for him because he is a Republican." --Andrew S. Navios

But with the Presidency of Bay State folk hero John F. Kennedy '40 and the growth of younger brother Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.), the state took a strong turn toward the new Democratic liberalism of active government participation at home and abroad.

In 1972, the state joined the District of Columbia as the only parts of the country supporting Democrat George S. McGovern against incumbent President Richard M. Brooke, earning in the process the appelation. The People's Republic of Massachusetts." But same year also saw the reelection of the only Black Senator since Reconstruction, Edward M. Brooke, a liberal Republican who was considered one of the best politicians in the state.

There is an assumption because of what we did in 1972 that we are a totally Democratic state," says Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of recent voting trends. "But that's not so"

Yet Brooke was to be the last Republican to win a major election in the state. Why the state's Republicans plunged into irrelevance soon thereafter is a matter of disagreement among the Republican leaders who today hope to bring the party back to its former position of respectability.

At the root of the discussion are the strong ethnic and historical loyalties different groups of voters have had toward the parties. The Yankee Protestants, allied with the Republican party, had historically opposed the Irish Catholic immigrants, who found political voice in the Democratic party.

The deep resentment toward the Irish immigrants led to deep religious, cultural, and economic divisions between the parties--division which, for the most part, were non-ideological. During the mid-part of the century, Republican Senators like Leverett Saltonstall often advocated a liberal internationalism combined with a deep concern for social and environmental concerns.

But politicians in both parties agree that the ethnic hold over voters, and what some say is a continuing resentment towards the old-line Yankee Republicans, is being loosened, and that change could have a profound impact on both parties.

There are, however, still strong party ties that continue despite ideological shifts within the party, Democrats who favor the death penalty, oppose abortion, and oppose the nuclear freeze, are still sent to the Legislature, even when running against liberal Republicans.

"There are little old ladies in Dorchester who worship Ronald Reagan, but who will not vote for him because he is a Republican," says Rep. Andrew S. Natsios (R-Holliston), the Republican state party chairman. "It's not as if [the Democratic state leaders] are farning liberals."

Despite the strong liberal flavor of the state, politicians from across the ideological spectrum agree that party affiliations in the state legislature--generally considered the best indicator of electoral sympathies--do not accurately reflect the mind-set of the state.

Though Democrats hold a vast majority of seats in the legislature, the ideological make-up is strongly centrist. Senate President William M. Bulger (D-Boston) and House Speaker Thomas W. McGee (D-Lynn) are considered centrist, if not non-ideological, and liberals like Sen. George Bachrach (D-Watertown) and Sen. Jack H. Backman (D-Brookline) have little influence on policy matters.

But the demographics of state electoral politics appear to be changing, and the Republican Party machinery has long since excised the more liberal Yankees from its ranks--its two most visible members, Senate candidate Elliot L. Richardson '41 and defeated 1982 gubernatorial candidate John W. Sears '52 receive their most savage criticism from their own party.

"The Democratic party is struggling out of its New Deal skin and we're struggling out of our Tom Dewey, Wendell Wilkie skin," says Sears, a veteran of both State House and Boston city politics. "But the Republican party has never been the Yankee enclave everyone says it is."

Sears cites the current party leadership. Andrew Natsios, the party chairman, the sole Congressman Conte, and the minority leadership in both houses of the legislature as evidence that the days of Yankee Republicanism are long past.

Yet, the friction--many Republicans use the term "war"--between the liberal Yankees and the populist-conservative ethnics continues, with each wing blaming the other for the Party's inability to make a dent on the state political scene.

"We can't nominate the liberals and out-liberal the Democrats," says Gordon Nelson, a former state party chairman and a leader of the party's right wing. "Richardson is the type of candidate who used to win in this state, but no longer. That strategy doesn't work here anymore."

Nelson cites a string of liberal republican candidates, including Sears in 1982, gubernatorial candidate Francis W. Hatch, Jr. in '78, and Senator Ed Brooke in '78, who lost to Democrats. The reason, he says, is that they did not represent their real constituency, the working class Republicans and the conservative Democrats that booted Dukakis out of office in '78 in favor of right-wing Democrat Edward J. King.

The party must now strongly identify with President Reagan, who carried the state by 2421 votes out of nearly 2.5 million cast, he says. "Among those 200,000 people who vote in the Republican party, the most popular person is not Ray Shamie or Elliot Richardson, but Ronald Reagan."

But Republican moderates and liberals argue that the party's problems stem not from too liberal candidates, but rather from the Republican leadership's drift toward the right. They say the party's fortunes reached a nadir under the leadership of the likes of Gordon Nelson, whom Sears describes as "not only in right field but beyond the foul pole."

Says liberal State Rep. Thomas J. Vallely (D-Boston). "The Massachusetts republicans are dominated by the conservative wing of the party. But where the conservative movement has an intellectual underpinning around the country, there is no intellectual base in the state."

Democrats, say they have continued to dominate in state because they have captured the large moderate block in the electorate, most of whom are registered in neither party. The vote worked to their advantage in 1982, when Democrats--again with the exception of Silvio Conte--won every congressional race, the gubernatorial race, and the Senate race, with at least 58 percent of the vote. Rep. Barney M. Frank '62 (D-Newton Highland) swamped his Republican opponent Margaret M. Heckler, now secretary of Health and Human Services in the Reagan Administration, by a three-to-two margin in what had been expected to be a tight race.

Frank says the Democratic landslide in the state two years ago is proof that Reagan-brand conservatism is not a big draw in the state. Shamie, touting Reaganite ideology, pumped $2.3 million, most of it his own money, into his '82 Senate campaign against Ted Kennedy, but still received only 38 percent of the general election vote.

"We keep winning because the Republican party is moving ideologically further right," Frank says. "We have no real organizational strength around the state; the Republicans are just an extreme right-wing party."

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State Republican leaders, while lamenting their party's fortunes, appear to have no real remedy for their problems. The strategy conducted by younger, more conservative Republicans of identifying with the President may not pay off. Much of the Reagan support came from a dislike of Jimmy Carter, not because the state had made a rightward swing. The true test will be in November, when Reagan takes on the Dukakis machine in the state.

Despite the profusions of the party's right wing and the recent success of candidate Shamie, there is little evidence that the Republicans will begin offering a spate of Jack Kemp clones for statewide office to the exclusion of party moderates.

Natsios, considered one of the most astute politicians in the party, is a strong supporter of Vice-President Bush, and has few kind words for the populist-conservative movement that controlled the party platform in Dallas. He predicts that most of the Republican brass will support the more moderate Bush in the '88 Presidential sweepstakes.

Though Reagan may pull a few local legislators into office on his coattails, the Republicans will need a more permanent boost to break out of their decade-long doldrums. Despite the Republican Party's strong pro-business stance, the corporate money in Massachusetts is going to the Democrats.

Republican legislators, both moderate and conservative, openly play with the idea of scrapping the Republican Party and starting up a new group. But given the cold war between the two wings of the party, the would-be party-former would be hard pressed to give it a name.

The Liberal-Monetarist Party?