The Republican Party, which used to dominate the region’s politics, has now officially lost New England. The transformation evolved fairly slowly, but this year, it became complete — of the 22 U.S. House seats spanning New England’s six states, Dems lead the GOP, 21 to 1.<\/p>\n
There are a variety of explanations for this, but former New Hampshire Gov. Walter Peterson, a lifelong Republican, offered a pretty compelling account<\/a> to the New York Times.<\/p>\n “What the people want is basically to feel like the candidates of a political party are working for the people, not just following some niche issues,” Mr. Peterson said. “The old traditional Republican Party was conservative on small government, efficient government; believed in supporting people to give them a chance at life but not having people on the dole; wanted a balanced budget; and on social issues they were moderate, tolerant, live and let live. They didn’t dislike somebody from other religious viewpoints.”<\/p>\n He continued, “That was the old-fashioned conservative, but the word conservative today has been bastardized.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n See? Was that so hard? Someone send that guy a DNC membership brochure. As the DCCC noted<\/a>, “On the surge of new residents moving into New Hampshire for both tech industry jobs and an appealing retirement locale, Peterson says that these voters are ‘trying to figure out which party is more welcoming, and that’s clearly the Democratic Party right now.'”<\/p>\n The 2006 elections are obviously still fresh in everyone’s minds, but I suspect the quote that will forever be associated with the year came from former NBA star Charles Barkley, of all people, who told reporters in July, “I was a Republican — until they lost their minds<\/a>.”<\/p>\n I think New England just happened to notice this trend sooner than the rest of the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Republican Party, which used to dominate the region’s politics, has now officially lost New England. The transformation evolved fairly slowly, but this year, it became complete — of the 22 U.S. House seats spanning New England’s six states, Dems lead the GOP, 21 to 1. There are a variety of explanations for this, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nIndeed, it’s worth noting that Peterson was the co-chairman this year of Republicans for John Lynch, a GOP group committed to helping re-elect the incumbent Democratic governor of New Hampshire.<\/p>\n