Until the GOP drops the religious right, its gone.
The GOP doesn't have to drop the religious right, they just need to stop putting so much emphasis on social issues and governing by hostage crisis.
George HW Bush was a pragmatic conservative who won the last GOP landslide and carried much of the Northeast by convincing margins. That's what the Republican Party has to return to: pragmatic conservativism. We don't have to drop the Religious Right or become the Democratic Party. Just stop being ing insane about everything.
Winning elections and being conservative are not mutually exclusive.
That was also at a time of important electoral flux as it was the GOP's last romp in New England. His victories there probably had more to do with image, the economy, and tradition rather than his political stances, seeing how right he veered in order to make sure he had the nomination lined up for him in '88.
Remember that after the 1990s, "law and order" more or less disappeared as a significant electoral issue. For most of the mid- and late-20th century, Republicans had that advantage. People were worried about violent crime and domestic unrest. You had protests in the '60s, all those people trying to assassinate Gerald Ford in the '70s, the crack epidemic in the '80s. The Rodney King riots in 1992. Bill Clinton and the Democrats more or less had to play on Republican turf to win in the '90s by going on about school uniforms and having Tipper Gore talk about banning violent video games and whatever else was going on.
That's not an issue anymore. Not even uptight suburban moms are worried about being "tough on crime." Even conservatives have come around to the idea that simply throwing the book at people for minute infractions might not be the best strategy. Scaling back criminal sentencing and drug laws dovetails perfectly between social liberals who want a more lenient approach to drug use and who are concerned about high incarceration rates among minorities, and fiscal conservatives who finally realized that prisons are really expensive to run.
New Hampshire is the only true swing state in New England. New England has some GOP left at the local and state levels, but they have spit the bit as far as the national GOP is concerned.
One reason for this is that New England has always been one of our most pacifist regions. New England Republicans were always rather dovish on Vietnam; it was Sen. George Aiken (R-VT) whose suggestion for Vietnam was for the US to declare victory and get out. At the time of the Civil War, abolitionist New England did not want war; they viewed the South's leaving the Union as "purifying" the country. "Let The Erring Sisters Go!" was the front page headline in William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper when South Carolina seceded. Conversely, the South has long been the most pro-war, pro-military region and has a disproportionate number of military installations located there.
The 1992 GOP convention had a profound effect on moderate Republicans. They listened to Pat Buchanan talk about a "culture war", and that culture was, in no small part, an INTRA-party struggle. There was always a concern about the religious right among New England Republicans, but Buchanan's speech was to New England Republicans what Hubert Humphrey's Civil Rights proposals in 1948 were to Deep South Democrats. In both cases, it was never the same afterward.
