By almost any measure, the last decade for the Massachusetts Republican Party has began disaster. To wit:

* No Republican has been elected to major at wide office in 12 years.

* Only one of the state's 11 Congressmen, Rep Silvio O. Conte (R-Pittsfield) is a Republican. With two exceptions, no Republican has won a Congressional election in the state for nearly a decade.

* Only seven members of the 40-member Smith Senate are Republicans.

* Only 29 of the 140 representatives in the State House of Representatives are Republicans.

* In the state primary two years ago, according to election records, 1,211,217 Democrats voted, compared with 190.879 Republicans, a more than six-to-one ratio. In Cambridge, Democratic registration has out numbered Republican registration by eight to-one.

* A current Republican candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives is running because she answered an ad in the local paper asking for candidates.

The Republican lot has not always been such a sorry one. Republican governors ruled the state for the decade before Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, running on a fiscal austerity, no-taxes platform, won Beacon Hill for the Democrats.

Earlier in the century, the state was heavily Republican, voting for the GOP through 1928. In 1924, the state offered up the Republican's Republican. Calvin Coolidge. As the largely Irish Democrats gained strength from the first Irish Catholic Presidential candidate, Al Smith in 1928, and the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the two parties fought to a stalemate in the state through the fifties.

"There are little old ladies in Do 'chester to worship Ronald Reagan, but who will not state for him because he is a Republican." --Andrew S. Navios

But with the Presidency of Bay State folk hero John F. Kennedy '40 and the growth of younger brother Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.), the state took a strong turn toward the new Democratic liberalism of active government participation at home and abroad.

In 1972, the state joined the District of Columbia as the only parts of the country supporting Democrat George S. McGovern against incumbent President Richard M. Brooke, earning in the process the appelation. The People's Republic of Massachusetts." But same year also saw the reelection of the only Black Senator since Reconstruction, Edward M. Brooke, a liberal Republican who was considered one of the best politicians in the state.

There is an assumption because of what we did in 1972 that we are a totally Democratic state," says Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of recent voting trends. "But that's not so"

Yet Brooke was to be the last Republican to win a major election in the state. Why the state's Republicans plunged into irrelevance soon thereafter is a matter of disagreement among the Republican leaders who today hope to bring the party back to its former position of respectability.

At the root of the discussion are the strong ethnic and historical loyalties different groups of voters have had toward the parties. The Yankee Protestants, allied with the Republican party, had historically opposed the Irish Catholic immigrants, who found political voice in the Democratic party.