GOP governors take control in Northeast

MONTPELIER, Vt. – New England, the land of Ted Kennedy and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, is considered one of the most consistently liberal regions of the country.

And, yet, it also is home to a near-Republican sweep of Statehouses.

Five of the six New England states elected a Republican governor two weeks ago. Only Maine went with a Democrat, John Baldacci. It’s been 50 years since Republicans controlled five New England governorships.

When combined with neighboring New York, that makes the Northeast home to the greatest concentration of Republican chief executives anywhere in the country, edging out the South.

It’s enough to make an old Northeastern liberal wonder whether the voters have gone conservative.

Probably not, say political observers.

“In some of the states – notably Massachusetts and New York and to a lesser degree Vermont – you have such a heavy dominance by the Democrats that voters are inclined to use a Republican governor as a check on the power of the Democrats,” said Ralph Whitehead Jr., a journalism professor who analyzes politics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Many of the U.S. senators and congressmen from the region still are Democrats – 100 percent Democratic in Massachusetts – and their legislatures also are dominated by the Democrats.

In Vermont, Republican James Douglas was elected to succeed retiring Gov. Howard Dean, a Democrat. But voters gave Democrats a larger majority in the state Senate and added enough Democrats to the House that they are battling the GOP for control. Independents and a third party will determine the outcome of that.

In governor’s offices, the composition has changed dramatically. Before Election Day, there were three Republican governors in New England, two Democrats and one independent. After governors-elect are sworn in, there will be five Republicans and a single Democrat. In the South, by comparison, Democrats controlled eight governorships to the Republicans’ four before the election. Next year, each party will claim six.

Republican governors meet Thursday and Friday in Los Angeles and they’ll be analyzing the results just like many pundits have been doing.

The chairman of the Republican Governors Association, Connecticut Gov. John G. Rowland, was the only incumbent in New England who sought re-election, which he won. He insisted his fellow Republicans funnel campaign money into what he considered winnable races in the Northeast.

The vice chairman of the group, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, frequently ribbed him before the election about it. “He’d say, ‘There goes Rowland again, trying to rebuild the Rockefeller wing of the party,”‘ Rowland recalled Tuesday. “And he was right.”

Northeastern Republicans tend to be more moderate or liberal than their counterparts around the country – “fiscally conservative, socially inclusive guys,” in Rowland’s words – and that trend continued again with the new governors in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont.

In many ways, it’s the kind of political equation that long held sway in New England.

“This is a return to form,” said Garrison Nelson, a visiting professor of New England politics at Boston College and a University of Vermont political scientist.

“Here we have the nation’s historically most Republican region returning to its Republican roots, which is quite astounding,” said Nelson, who pored through the history books to determine it had been 50 years since Republicans held such power.

There are many who doubt the election results in New England suggest a turn toward the more conservative. The region has never been terribly conservative, electing left-of-center Republicans like New York’s Rockefeller or Vermont’s George Aiken.

They believe, instead, that New England reflected the national desire for change. There were big swings across the country on Nov. 5. When all of the governors-elect are sworn in, there will be 24 new faces, according to the National Governors’ Association, 26 of them Republican and 24 Democrat.

“I think the message is really one of churn on a national basis,” said Peter Wiley of the NGA. Regions that traditionally have been kind to Democrats went for Republican governors, states like South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama.