OLD TOWN – On French Island, GOP might as well stand for Get Out, Pronto!

“If they’re Republicans I don’t want ’em, honey,” said 83-year-old Pauline Baillargeon, a lifelong resident of the small Franco-American community tucked away on the east side of this paper mill town.

Almost needless to say, Baillargeon, like 75 percent of enrolled voters on the island, is a lifelong Democrat.

In the past 20 years, voters here have elected only one Republican – Olympia Snowe, twice – for any office from dogcatcher to president.

Walter Mondale trounced Ronald Reagan here in 1984. Michael Dukakis did the same to George H.W. Bush four years later.

And should George W. Bush win on French Island this November?

“I guess I’ll have to move,” Baillargeon said, sitting at the table in her small, tidy home next door to the island’s community center.

While French Island, formally known as Treat and Webster Island, probably won’t tilt Republican anytime soon, the Grand Old Party has made gains in other Democratic strongholds of late. Voters in both Waterville and Biddeford – where Republicans are outnumbered at least 2 to 1 – recently elected GOP mayors.

Do these victories mark a fundamental shift in the political landscape of these Franco towns, where Democratic politics has been a family tradition for decades?

When elephants fly.

“It’s not like they’re lining up to become Republicans,” said Bowdoin College political scientist Christian Potholm, although noting that GOP success stories in these areas have one common thread – a focus on the small businesses that still fuel many Franco communities.

In his November win, Waterville businessman Paul LePage became the city’s first Republican mayor in 25 years.

The first five months have not been easy, said LePage, who finds himself butting heads with the largely Democratic council on issues as small as staggering city employees’ lunch hours and as big as cutting $1 million from the budget.

“Oh, if I ever give them an opportunity to get rid of me, they’ll take it. I beat them and they’re looking for payback,” said LePage, the general manager of Marden’s Discount Stores. “I travel light and keep a full tank of gas.”

LePage, plainspoken in either English or French – a plus in his heavily Franco hometown – is quick to admit his win was helped by a rift among Democrats, who essentially fielded two candidates, one of whom dropped out of the party just before the election to run as an independent.

There have been other anomalies.

In 1994, tax-cutting Republican John Hathaway became the first ever from his party to claim the state Senate seat that includes Biddeford, where 90 percent of enrolled voters were Democrats at the time. Now that number has dropped to about 83 percent, still among the highest concentrations in the state.

And no GOP victory has come easy in these working-class areas where voters tend to view the Republican Party as a party of the wealthy.

In Lewiston, where the city’s park is named for John F. Kennedy and 73 percent of enrolled voters are Democrats, Stavros Mendros won two consecutive terms in the Maine House, becoming the first Republican to win even one term in Lewiston since 1902.

First, however, Mendros had to lose two elections and sell his business to campaign full time. The devotion made it possible, he said, to convince voters to elect him over a two-term incumbent Democrat and member of the Legislature’s powerful Appropriations Committee.

“People had to get over it,” Mendros, now 36 and a candidate for state Senate, said of his Republican label. “Now we’re taking over,” he later joked.

But even Biddeford and Lewiston, despite their long ties to the Democratic Party, aren’t necessarily its most impenetrable fortresses.

Based on percentages alone, that distinction would go to Aroostook County’s St. John Valley, where nine towns are among the top 20 with the highest percentage of registered Democrats.

In Frenchville, the valley’s geographic center, Roland Pelletier counts himself among the 87 percent of enrolled voters who vote Democratic.

The 67-year-old retired papermaker has some pretty strict criteria for the Republican who would earn his vote.

“He’d really have to be something else,” said Pelletier, counting Bangor’s own Bill Cohen as the one who came closest to meeting the criteria by campaigning extensively in the County during his runs for the U.S. House and Senate.

Still, it wasn’t close enough for Pelletier.

“People appreciate that kind of contact,” he said. “But I never voted for him anyway.”

Despite the possibility of tainting his lifelong affiliation with the Democrats, Pelletier revealed a secret of sorts: His 35-year-old son, Philip, is a – gasp! – Republican.

“Oh, God,” he recalled saying when his son broke the news. “Oh, well.”

Philip Pelletier, who now lives in New Hampshire and owns a corporate recruiting business in Massachusetts, said his political leanings stem from his belief in smaller government. Moreover, his views were shaped during his rearing in the Reagan era.

This November, the son of a lifelong Democrat said he again would vote for the son of a former Republican president. George W. Bush’s policies, he explained, have helped his business thrive.

While there’s no chance the son will join his father in voting for Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry this election, Philip, who has never voted for a Democrat, left open the possibility. Sometime in his life, that is.

“Not yet,” said Philip in a telephone interview from his office. “But I’m still young.”