"I knew that I wasn't going to be around that much longer anyway," said Gilchrest, praising Specter for putting the "integrity the country needs for good public policy" above "loyalty or disloyalty to political mythology."
The sharp drop in the percentage of voters who called themselves Republicans in the presidential election has extended into this year, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of public opinion polls. During the past five years, according to Pew, the party has lost a quarter of its base.
In Maryland, too, Republicans have been in decline since 2002, when Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. became the first Republican since Spiro Agnew to be elected governor.
According to state Board of Elections figures, the number of registered Republicans had fallen to 26.9 percent, compared with 56.8 percent for the Democrats, by the start of this year. the past seven years, the number of Democratic voters in the state has expanded more than two-and-a-half times faster than the Republicans.
"We're one of the most Democratic states in the entire country," said John Willis of the University of Baltimore, former secretary of state and co-author of a forthcoming book, Maryland Politics and Government.
That Democratic tilt is particularly evident in presidential elections. Maryland was President Barack Obama's sixth-best state last year.
But Willis cautioned that Maryland's extreme political polarization makes it hazardous to generalize. In western Maryland, for example, Garrett County hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since its formation in 1872.
"Maryland is Republican in Western Maryland and in many places on the [Eastern] Shore, although the Shore is fairly competitive at the local level," he said.
Republicans also hold a fairly stable portion of seats in the state legislature - about 30 percent. And they remain competitive at the local level in many areas - though not Montgomery and Prince George's counties or the city of Baltimore, which have no Republican officeholders, Willis noted.
Privately, Maryland Democrats are already talking about whether they can redraw district lines after next year's census in ways that would give them a chance to capture all of the state's congressional seats. States that currently have no Republicans serving in the House of Representatives include Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.
