The biggest political news of the past week came via the polls – the Boston Globe showing Charlie Baker opening up a lead in his race against Martha Coakley, and the Maine Sunday Telegram showing incumbent Governor Paul LePage winning handily in the three-way Maine gubernatorial race. Some have expressed skepticism about the size of the Baker lead although the trend lines appear to be in his direction. In Maine, the LePage lead came as a genuine shocker – a major departure from the tight race that every other poll had been showing until now.

The comparison between the Massachusetts and Maine Republican gubernatorial nominees couldn’t be starker. LePage is a Tea Party Republican to the core; Baker is a Traditional Massachusetts Republican. LePage has a compelling personal story – the story of a young man born into a highly dysfunctional home who, through a combination of pluck and luck, was able to rise to become a successful businessman, then mayor, and for the past four years governor. His hard-scrabble early years appear to have led directly to his hard, right-wing ideology, one that seems to flow from a well spring of anger and resentment. LePage is famous for making harsh, sometimes coarse comments about anyone who disagrees with him, and governing the past two years with a Democratic legislature, he seems content to govern in gridlock rather than compromise.

In contrast, if Charlie Baker becomes the next governor of Massachusetts, his election will mark a return to normalcy rather than a departure from our political norm. Since Mike Dukakis walked down the State House steps following the end of his third term, Massachusetts voters have elected Republican governors to serve for 16 of the past 24 years. Prior to Dukakis’s first term, Republican governors ruled from 1961 through 1974 with only a brief two year pause (1963/1964). Massachusetts is a blue state, but it has never been so blue as to lock out of high office Traditional Massachusetts Republicans. Baker is solidly in the tradition of the “Traditional Massachusetts Republican” – fiscally moderate/conservative, socially moderate/liberal – an ideological mix that has a proven appeal to Bay State voters who desire a comfortable counterbalance to the lopsided Democratic Legislature.

The Traditional Massachusetts Republican is a branch of a larger family – the New England Republican, a type that has deep roots in the rocky but fertile soil of our six-state enclave. The roster of the region’s GOP leaders of the past brings to mind words like probity, character, and stolidity. The ground-breaking and indomitable Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. Vermont’s courteous George Aiken. The sharp-minded William Chaffee of Rhode Island. The statesmanship of Maine’s William Cohen. The urbane Prescott Bush and the erudite Lowell Weicker of Connecticut. These regional leaders represented a form of Republicanism that emanated from the hard-scrabble lives of constituents who worked an unforgiving soil, toiled in a grueling fishing industry, labored in factories and mills. These citizens believed in the virtues of hard work and rectitude, the importance of fairness and equal rights, and the role of government to improve the quality of their lives. When New Hampshire’s Norris Cotton voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it was deemed by many to be a departure from what was expected of a New England Republican. Cotton quickly made amends by voting for the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The Traditional Massachusetts Republican traces his or her roots to the Brahmin Yankee, a type well represented by Christian Herter, Leverett Saltonstall, Eliot Richardson, Frank Sargent, and William Weld. The GOP in the Bay State has also had its share of diversity. Leaders like Silvio Conte, John Volpe, and, famously, Edward Brooke played on a national stage (as did their famous predecessors the Lodges), often to great acclaim. If he wins, Baker will come to power as heir to that tradition, but very much as his own man, more serious and policy-oriented than Weld and Paul Cellucci, more socially liberal than Mitt Romney, perhaps as much or more open to change and new ideas as Frank Sargent.

The Traditional Massachusetts Republican continues to thrive today. Unlike Maine, Tea Party Republicanism hasn’t taken root in Massachusetts where candidates representing that wing of the Republican Party have been easily dispatched by establishment leaders. Baker, who handily defeated a Tea Party primary opponent, comes to this election as a legatee of the “kinder, gentler” wing of the Republican Party. Baker is a direct political descendant of the Weld/ Cellucci/Swift era. It was Weld, don’t forget, who appointed Margaret Marshall to the Supreme Judicial Court, and Cellucci who made her Chief Justice. That’s the kind of choice a Traditional Massachusetts Republican makes.

We may be tempted to think of Mitt Romney as an outlier, but in fact he governed the Commonwealth for the most part as a Traditional Massachusetts Republican. Romney’s approach to health care reform, his support for the Rose Kennedy Greenway, his easy rapport with Senate President Robert Travaglini and Speaker Sal DiMasi – it was as if he were taking a page from the Ronald Reagan playbook when Reagan was governor of California, when fiery rhetoric more often than not gave way to consensus building.

Of course labels don’t always accurately describe a product, or a person. Perhaps the most conservative governor in my lifetime was Democratic Governor Edward King – the man President Reagan called his “favorite” Democratic governor. In those days, a person’s ideology was upfront and unmistakable. King ran as a conservative and governed as one. Likewise, Dukakis ran as a liberal and governed as a liberal. There was no bait-and-switch after the polls closed – you pretty much got what you saw. The political world is different now, more choreographed and structured and less inclined to candor (although one must note that LePage is, if anything, 100 percent unvarnished candor, for better or worse).

Baker, like LePage, is first and foremost a businessman, but Baker is also a policy wonk whose organizing principle appears to be fiscal conservatism tempered by practical necessity and socially progressive instincts. Some may find it difficult to square that circle, but Baker appears to have a keen enough mind, and ample self-confidence, to do it. Unlike Weld, Baker has the reputation of being interested in the quirky nuances of government. Unlike Cellucci, he appears to be less interested in building a state party network. This is good for citizens, who will benefit from a less partisan approach to governing, and bad for the entrenched political establishment, which thrives on putting up barriers to inclusion.

Baker has been on this track before, and one gets the sense that his defeat in 2010 triggered the kind of personal introspection that strengthens a person. Baker offer voters the bottom-line mindset of a businessman who can master the numbers combined with the granular focus of a local selectman, tempered by a socially progressive instinct that embraces the idea that government can often be the vehicle for improving people’s lives, in ways large and small. That is an approach to governing that wouldn’t sell well in Tea Party Republican circles in most of the 50 states, but here in Massachusetts it is as comfortable as that worn-out easy chair you sit in every January when you are snow-bound and re-reading Ethan Frome.

James Aloisi is a former state transportation secretary and a principal at the Pemberton Square Group.