Former Sen. Lincoln Chafee, Brown Class of ’75, after he gave a lecture there in February. He is a visiting fellow at the university’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

Former Sen. Lincoln Chafee tells me that when he disaffiliated from the Republican Party in July, “it felt good.”

Well, that’s nice.

But I do wonder about Rhode Island. Is it en route to being a one-party state? No jokes, please. Sure, Democrats dominate, really dominate, especially in the General Assembly. But for decades you’ve seen Republicans somewhere among the top nine elective posts: the four congressional seats and the five general offices.

In fact, at times the GOP has held as many as five of these slots.

With Chafee’s 2006 loss, the Republicans’ grip slipped to one: the governorship. And with term-limited Don Carcieri, who barely survived last year, unable to run again in 2010, there is a real prospect the party will then be shut out.

I thought Chafee might try in 2010 for the governorship his late father, John, held in the 1960s and thus keep the seat Republican. But now comes word that the liberal Chafee, isolated within the national party, has become an independent.

He tells me he’s “unlikely” to run for governor and that if he does try for that post, or for mayor of Providence, where he now lives, he won’t return to GOP ranks to do it.

That, he says, is a measure of the dark shadow cast by the national party, and anyone who’d run as a Republican here risks being tarred by the tie. “It’s a bad association right now,” he says.

Even so, Chafee, 54, says he’d welcome a gubernatorial bid by Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian, a close ally. Avedisian, who says he has no plans to leave the party, says he’s focused now on a 2008 reelection. While not ruling out a try for governor later, he’s more interested in the House or Senate.

Avedisian is fully aware of the dire straits the GOP faces around the state. He says, “The bright spot of ’06 for me was to have Joe Almond win (for town administrator) in Lincoln, so at least I knew that at the League of Cities and Towns there’d be a second.” Republicans struck out in Warwick City Council races. Yet Avedisian rolled to victory.

If Chafee and Avedisian don’t seek the 2010 GOP gubernatorial nod, that could give conservative former Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey a clear path.

Laffey, who lost a 2006 primary to Chafee, has yet to say he’s running. If the state fiscal situation stays dicey and Laffey positions himself as a serious-minded, skilled administrator with a background in high finance, he could have a chance.

But this would require modulating his image as an acerbic flame-thrower and probably masking, even more than he did last year, his conservative views on issues. Chafee said, “I just don’t think that philosophy that he represents is going to catch on here.”

(Of course, Carcieri has some conservative views, but they took a back seat to his appeal as an accomplished businessman who would revive the economy and transform government. And when campaigning he projected a much warmer image than Laffey manages.)

You can trace the Republicans’ run of success — well, at least they won some elections — to 1958, when Chris Del Sesto broke a longtime Democratic monopoly on the top offices and won the governorship. Terms were only two years then, and he lost a 1960 reelection bid.

In 1962, John Chafee reclaimed the governorship for the GOP. He and/or other Republicans went on to win something through 1972. In 1974, the Democrats swept and for two years there was no Republican in top office.

Chafee won a Senate seat in 1976 and ever since there has been a GOP presence in the nine major posts.

When Linc Chafee, free to act as a private citizen, disaffiliated from the party, it climaxed years of disaffection. Indeed, it had been evident as far back as 2001 that he’d been mulling a move. It may have seemed inevitable that he’d eventually do it, but he’s also stubborn.

I asked him last week if, before he entered politics to run for Warwick City Council and then mayor, he ever consciously decided to be a Republican or was it just a family thing.

He replied, “I never thought, never even for a millisecond, thought of anything but being a Republican.”

He listed GOP officeholders over the years, including Rep. Claudine Schneider, Secretary of State Susan Farmer, and Attorneys General Herb DeSimone, Richard Israel and Arlene Violet. “It was a great party,” he said.

What drove him to distraction was the unbending right wing-agenda of President Bush and the Senate GOP.

Several interest groups, such as environmentalists and advocates of gay and abortion rights, looked up to Chafee.

Did it weigh on him that, in now leaving the GOP, those folks will have one less advocate in party circles?

He said no. In general, he declared, “What I found in the ’06 election was that pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-environment Republicans — they’ve disappeared.”

He spoke of the dread he’d feel as he’d show up for the weekly GOP caucus meetings.

He said he believes his father, who also was moderate and had his own innings with his conservative colleagues, would have respected his decision to leave.

Chafee said he is concerned about the possibility of Republicans being shut out of major office in Rhode Island. “I don’t know what will happen, the dynamics of who’s going to challenge the powerful Democratic Party here, and that is important.”

But he has no answers.

Chafee is a visiting fellow at Brown University, his alma mater. After he said it’s unlikely he’ll run for governor in 2010, I asked about Providence mayor. He said, “It’s too far away. I’m really happy here.” He indicated he’ll take another year before seriously considering a return to the political wars.

For months after his defeat, it was clear he was hurting. Now, he calls himself “relieved.” He said, “People tell me, ‘Linc, you look healthier,’ and it’s true.”

Still, he said that when he was about to drop his membership in the party, he felt a twinge.

He’s still registered to vote in Exeter, where he and his wife, Stephanie, have a farm. He reports that when he walked into Town Hall and said he wanted to disaffiliate, the folks on hand — workers and perhaps people who’d stopped in to do business — put up a fuss and said, “This is sad. You can’t do this!”

In fact, he says, when someone asked if he was sure he wanted to go ahead, he said, “OK, let me think about it,” and he drove around for a few minutes to mull it over. He returned and said, “That’s what I want to do.”

Chafee says he’ll be registering in Providence; Stephanie already has.

She told me she, too, would leave the GOP and return to the unaffiliated voter ranks she was in until she married. Her reaction to Linc’s disaffiliating? “Good for him ... He really has struggled.”

As for a run for governor or mayor in 2010, “I only want him to do what he wants. When he’s happy, I’m happy.”

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com