In traditionally Republican New Hampshire, Democratic Gov. John Lynch, right, racked up a record win, garnering more than 70 percent of the vote on Nov. 7.

AP / JIM COLE

PROVIDENCE — In the crosswinds of political culture, New Englanders have become more like each other than we are like voters from other regions of the country.

If the Rolling Stones were to parse this region’s election results, their ode to politics in the six states would be “Paint It Blue.”

From Lake Champlain to Block Island Sound, Democrats were ascendant on Nov. 7. Perhaps all one needs to know about the parlous state of the Republican Party is that — for the first time since the Civil War — the six states combined have only one Republican U.S. House member: Chris Shays, who represents Connecticut’s wealthy New York City suburbs.

The GOP lost four New England House seats — two in New Hampshire and two in Connecticut – in the Democratic blowout, as well as the U.S. Senate seat held by Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island that had been in Republican hands and the Chafee family for three decades.

“The people who have chosen to remain in New England and those who have moved here are liberals on social issues,” says Garrison Nelson, a political science professor at the University of Vermont who studies the region’s politics.

As long as the national Republican Party continues to emphasize such stands as opposing legal abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and gay rights, New Englanders are not very likely to be attracted to the GOP, experts say.

And in a region with the smallest number of evangelical Christians in the United States, according to public opinion surveys, few are drawn to Republican politics through religion.

“It is not your father or grandfather’s Republican Party,” says Howard Reiter, chairman of the political science department at the University of Connecticut. ``I’ve long suspected that this has a lot to do with religion. Religion just means something different in the Northeast and New England than it does in some other parts of the country.”

Reiter says that perhaps the region’s long history of religious and ethnic conflict has given way to a newfound live-and-let-live attitude when it comes to worship.

Nelson also points to a more highly educated electorate and to the high intermarriage rates among Roman Catholics, Protestants and Jews.An older generation of New Englanders can remember a half-century ago, when it was difficult to get a Congregationalist, Catholic and Jew to agree on political choices – or anything else. Indeed, the warring ethnic groups of Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans and native Yankees didn’t mingle much socially, preferring to stick to their own neighborhoods, churches and clubs.

Now, in the post-ethnic 21st century, Massachusetts has Deval Patrick, a black man, as governor-elect, New Hampshire has no Republican U.S. House members, and Connecticut is down to one. Vermont, once the most reliably Republican state in the country, now has two U.S. senators, Democrat Patrick Leahy and independent Bernard Sanders, who caucus with Democrats and a state legislature that is solidly in Democratic hands.

Republicans lost the governorship in Massachusetts. Governor Carcieri held on by the thinnest of margins to the Rhode Island governorship, a position Republicans have held since 1995.

Some of this, experts say, is due to antipathy toward President Bush, whose policies, especially on the Iraq war, are vastly unpopular in a region in which he won no states in 1994.

But something else may be going on below the surface.

In presidential elections, the region has become deep blue. Since 1992, every New England state in every presidential election has voted for the Democratic candidate, except New Hampshire in 2000, which went narrowly for Mr. Bush.

Fifty years ago, you could draw a line that started in Bennington, Vt., in the west, through Keene, N.H., and on to Kittery, Maine, in the east. To the north, the three Protestant, rural states of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine were Republican, and to the south, the three Catholic industrial urban states of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts were Democratic. In 1960, northern New England voters supported Richard Nixon, and the three southern states voted for John F. Kennedy.

New England was once so Republican that in 1896 it only had one Democratic U.S. House member, John F. “Honey” Fitzgerald, the grandfather of JFK.

THE MOST STARTLING change in the region has occurred in New Hampshire, where on Nov. 7, for the first time in the state’s modern history, a majority of the state House and Senate are Democratic, and where a Democratic governor, John Lynch, rolled up a record victory of better than 70 percent of the vote.

The most unusual aspect of the New Hampshire results, says Andrew Smith, a political-science professor and pollster at the University of New Hampshire, is that for the first time ever there were more straight-party Democratic votes than straight-party GOP votes.

Smith has traced the evolution of an emerging New Hampshire via census and election results. What has happened, says Smith, is that the people who have recently moved to the Granite State tend to be better-educated than natives, more likely to work in the state’s flourishing high-tech economy and to be liberal on social issues.

“The state is going to become more Democratic in the next five to ten years,” says Smith, who also conducts polls for The Boston Globe.

New Hampshire still has two Republican U.S. senators, John Sununu and Judd Gregg. “Gregg and Sununu were lucky [that] neither of them was up for election this year,” says Nelson, the UVM professor.

Smith cautions against reading too much into the pendulum swings. As is the case with tides, elections ebb and flow between Democrats and Republicans.

Yet, underneath the election returns are trends that will make it difficult for the GOP to bounce back.

For example, in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the GOP has scant representation in state legislatures. The Massachusetts GOP has almost ceased to exist on the local level, says Tobe Berkovitz, a Boston University professor and former political consultant who follows Massachusetts politics.

The same is true in Rhode Island, say Maureen Moakley, chairwoman of the political science department at the University of Rhode Island. The Republican Party in Rhode Island, she says, is like a sports team that “has no bench.”

As long as the national GOP mirrors red-state social attitudes, it will be very difficult to recruit young New Englanders to its banner. Even in Maine, which has the strongest two-party competition left in the region, most of the Republicans tend to be moderates with little attraction to the GOP national agenda, says Kenneth Palmer, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Maine and a longtime observer of Maine politics.

``People in northern New England who are conservative are conservative on economic issues,” says Palmer. ``They are moderates on the other things.”

Republican Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe are the last remaining GOP moderates from New England. Chafee’s defeat, says Nelson, “was another nail in the coffin of a once-proud tradition, moderate Republicanism in New England.”

David Gergen is a Republican who was a top aide to presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. He now teaches at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. ``Maybe the Republican Party ought to rethink its position on stem cell research,” Gergen said.

Governorships to a large degree are insulated from national trends, says Reiter, the University of Connecticut professor. ``Governors are more able to carve out a separate identity based on local issues,” he said.

Thus, there remain three GOP governors in the region — James Douglas in Vermont, Jodi Rell in Connecticut and Carcieri.

The national GOP shows no inclination to worry about its status in the region, says Nelson. When the party has an all-Southern Senate leadership, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and brings back from exile Trent Lott of Mississippi, ``that’s like sending a message to New England that we don’t care about you; we’ll just write off the region.”

Nelson, who has taught two generations of students at the University of Vermont, says that the worst harbinger for the GOP is that young people are not active in the party’s trenches. ``It is not the ‘cool’ party, and as long as they feel they have to water the Southern base on social issues, they will never again be a majority in New England.”