Massachusetts Republican Party
|
Massachusetts Republican Party
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Chairperson | Kirsten Hughes |
| Senate leader | Bruce Tarr |
| House leader | Bradley Jones Jr. |
| Headquarters | Boston, Massachusetts |
| Ideology |
Conservatism Fiscal conservatism Liberal conservatism |
| National affiliation | Republican Party |
| Colors | Red |
| Seats in the Upper House |
6 / 40
|
| Seats in the Lower House |
34 / 160
|
| Website | |
| http://www.massgop.com | |
The Massachusetts Republican Party is the Massachusetts branch of the United States Republican Party. Governance of the party takes the form of a State Committee which, in accordance with Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 52, consists of one man and one woman from each of the 40 Senate Districts of the Commonwealth, who are elected at the quadrennial election of Electors for President of the U.S. (commonly called the "Presidential Primary"). Committee officers are elected by the State Committee.
The Republican Party in Massachusetts was the dominant party in the state for nearly seventy years from (1858 through the 1920s). Republican candidates routinely won the state governorship as well as most other state and Federal offices. The Republican dominance of Massachusetts slowly died in the 1920s and 1930s as predominantly Democratic immigrant groups changed the traditionally Republican White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) Massachusetts into the Catholic Democratic majority state that it remains today. Additionally helping the Democratic take-over of Massachusetts was the high unionization of workers in the state, coupled with the onset of the Great Depression and the rise of the New Deal Democrats. By the 1950s, most of the urban-suburban areas of Massachusetts were largely Democratic, leaving just a couple pockets of strongly Republican rural areas in Barnstable, Nantucket, Dukes, Bristol, Berkshire, and Franklin Counties.
In the 1950s, the influential Kennedy Family worked its way into the leadership of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, and helped guide the Democrats into multiple consecutive victories, much at the expense of the Republican Party. In 1952, John F. Kennedy defeated Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. for the US Senate, ending the Republican Cabot-Lodge dynasty that had dominated Massachusetts politics since the American Revolutionary War. John F. Kennedy soon after would again lead the Democratic Party, becoming the successful 1960 Democratic candidate for president, and in doing so delivering Massachusetts solidly to the Democrats on the federal level until 1980, when Ronald Reagan won Massachusetts, a feat he repeated in 1984. The fiscally conservative, and largely Rockefeller Republicans of Massachusetts would slowly lose power in the next 24 years, losing their last US Senate seat to Paul Tsongas in 1978, and five US House of Representatives seats in the same period. On the state level, Democrats would take super-majorities in both houses of the state legislature, and would dominate the governorship for 22 years out of the 34-year period from 1957 to 1990.
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