 The Republican dominance of Massachusetts slowly died in the 1920s and 1930s as predominantly Democratic immigrant groups changed the traditionally Republican White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) Massachusetts into the Catholic Democratic majority state that it remains today.The Democratic take-over of Massachusetts was aided by the high unionization of workers in the state, coupled with the onset of the Great Depression and the rise of the New Deal Democrats.In 1928, Catholic Al Smith became the first Democrat to carry Massachusetts in a presidential election since the party's foundation a century prior.