When the next Congress convenes in the nation’s capital in January, the only New England Republican among them will hail from Maine.

The sole GOP holdout in the U.S. House among the region’s 21 members will be U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin, whose northern Maine district re-elected him by a wide margin last week to a second two-year term.

Maine’s U.S. Sen. Susan Collins will find herself the only one of 12 New England senators hailing from the Republican side of the aisle.

The GOP has struggled in New England for decades, occasionally winning a handful of seats but always backsliding. It’s never quite been shut out entirely in the region that once provided the party’s most solid support, but it’s as close now as it’s ever been to losing everything on the federal level to the Democrats.

One step down, though, Republicans are doing pretty well. There are GOP governors in Maine and Massachusetts who will be joined by newly elected state leaders in Vermont and New Hampshire next year.

“Nationally, people like to say Republicans are extinct in New England, but it’s really that they’ve had trouble at the national and congressional level,” said James Melcher, a political scientist at the University of Maine at Farmington. “Sometimes people look too much at the national picture.”

Still, when it comes to federal offices, New England’s GOP has been taking it on the chin.

For six years, New Hampshire provided another Republican senator, Kelly Ayotte, and a GOP congressman, Frank Guinta, has held a seat since 2014. But both came up short on Election Day, by narrow margins, so Democrats will take their positions come January.

At the same time that the GOP lost two congressional offices, however, it cemented control of the statehouse in New Hampshire, where it will wield power in both houses and the governor’s office in the wake of this year’s voting.

There’s only one other state in the region where one party will have a lock on both the legislature and the governor’s office: Rhode Island, where the Democrats hold the power. In Connecticut, though, an evenly split state Senate will give the Democratic lieutenant governor the ability to break ties so her party effectively maintains the last word there as well.

This isn’t the first time Republican numbers have dipped so low from New England. From 2012 to 2014, there were also only two federal lawmakers, Collins and Ayotte. Not a single one of the region’s House seats was held by a GOP member.

Jason Savage, executive director of the Maine Republicans, said he thinks the GOP is “going to start gaining more ground” in 2018 and beyond, especially if Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress are successful.

“There are some places Republicans can pick up ground,” he said, including Maine.

What’s necessary, he said, is for the party to be more than “just a sledgehammer” and to offer solutions to problems that people care about, for which he believes Maine can be a model.

He said the Republican winners should be ready for “reasonable discussion” and compromise rather than “trying to ram some stuff through.”

Poliquin, who did not respond to requests for comment, may be a good example of what the GOP needs to focus on.

Melcher said Democrats have tended to underestimate Poliquin’s political savvy.

Pointing to the more than $15 million spent on the race between Poliquin and Democrat Emily Cain, Melcher said it is “pretty impressive” that he won big despite “the greatest economic development package Maine’s had since ships were invented.”

Savage said the millions spent attacking Poliquin were “only making him stronger” among voters who didn’t buy the Democrats’ argument that the congressman was a Wall Street tool.

Melcher said Poliquin showed during his first term in the House that he knew when to break with his party, mostly on trade proposals unpopular with his 2nd District, where voters often blame unfair trade for job losses over the years.

“He’s not afraid to take a position that is what’s best for the people of his district,” Savage said, even if House leaders want him on the other side of an issue.

Poliquin “doesn’t allow himself to be subject to pressure,” Savage said. “He knows how to make sure that things going on in Washington don’t have an impact here.”

Savage said Poliquin’s success is also “a testament to his hard work,” getting out in the district constantly and talking to people and businesses about issues “that actually impact lives.”

That Poliquin is also “down to earth, upbeat and happy” as he goes around the district he lets people know he’s worthy of their support, Savage said.

Savage said he views Poliquin’s 2nd District as “the leading edge” of a growing backlash against big government solutions that ordinary people have grown skeptical about.

He said issues such as climate change have spurred a host of regulations that may sound good in the abstract, but voters have come to see “a whole lot of impact downstream” that winds up costing them jobs and opportunity.

Areas that are more wealthy can absorb the blow longer than a place like northern Maine, Savage said.

History offers New England Republicans some comfort. From the party’s founding before the Civil War until the Great Depression, the six New England states almost always voted for GOP candidates, something they all did on the presidential level for the last time during Ronald Reagan’s re-election run in 1984.

As recently as 1990, Republicans held seven U.S. House seats in the region.

Just a decade ago, until the 2006 election, they held five seats. Since then, though, Republicans have never won a House seat in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut or Vermont.

Until Poliquin’s win two years ago, Maine hadn’t elected a Republican member to the House since the 1994 race, a two-decade drought.

Trump’s success in securing a single electoral vote in Maine’s 2nd District marks the first time since 2000 that a Republican presidential candidate locked up any electors in New England. That year, George W. Bush won New Hampshire.

Poliquin has at least one reason to hope for reinforcements come 2018.

The Democrat who defeated Guinta in New Hampshire, Carol Shea-Porter, has beaten him before, always in a presidential election year. When the midterms rolled around two years later, in 2010 and 2014, Guinta knocked her out of office as they swapped the seat back and forth. So she’s almost certainly gearing up for a tough fight to break the trend next time around.

Savage said he sees a chance, too, to knock out U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democrat first elected in 2008 in Maine’s 1st District.

Pingree “is not invincible,” Savage said, pointing out that her challenger, Mark Holbrook, collected more votes than Cain did despite spending only a fraction of what the Democrats threw at Poliquin’s race.

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