New York, NY —

After 12 years of prominence in a largely Democratic bastion, New York state Republicans have been decimated. Democrats have come back in top state and national offices with a vengeance. The state's Republicans are left with a party in disarray. WNYC's Elaine Rivera has more:

REPORTER: It's the bi-monthly meeting at the Gertrude and Morrison Parker Westside Republican Club in Manhattan. Although they claim 400 members, there are only 10 people in the room.

They talk is of the past 12 years of Republican power and visibility...and how to get it back. Armand Zigismondi, the club's co-president, says Republicans voters have always been vastly outnumbered in New York. And he captures the feeling of what it's like to be a Republican here - especially nowadays.

ZIGISMONDI: Frustrating, aggravating and not entirely satisfied the way we sometimes do business....

REPORTER: Since the early 1990s, however, the way Republicans did business worked. There was a surge of Republican takeovers in key offices in a dominant blue state.

Alfonse D'Amato was elected a U.S. senator; a little-known Republican state senator, George Pataki, defeated a Democratic icon - three-term gubernatorial incumbent Mario Cuomo for the top seat. And in 1993, Rudy Giuliani eked out a victory over the very Democratic mayor David Dinkins. And then, in 2001, Mike Bloomberg, running as a Republican, beat out a group of well-known Democrats to win as mayor.

But political observers say most of these Republicans, to win in New York and hang on to their power, shifted to the center, and moved away from traditional Republican values. Fred Dicker, political columnist for the New York Post, says they wanted to appeal to the state's overwhelmingly dominant Democratic voter base.

DICKER: The Republican Party went for big spending they were seen as having embraced the sort of central constituent groups of the Democratic party in the hopes of survival - they survived for a while - but in the end voters decided to take the real thing, real Democrats, and now the Republicans find themselves without a meaningful identity.

REPORTER: There were other blows as well. There was a hemorrhaging of people leaving traditional Republican territories such as upstate New York. Also, tax increases and corruption scandals in dense Republican-populated places such as Long Island and Westchester County turned voters off. Fred Siegel, a professor at Cooper Union, says the exodus and the scandals hurt the party from bringing in new blood.

SIEGEL: Young entrepreneurial energetic Republicans have been flooding out of upstate New York and out of Long Island. That means if you're a young aspiring politician and you're a Republican it's probably best to make your career elsewhere....

REPORTER: And critics say those prominent Republicans such as Pataki, Giuliani, and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, refused to build up the party's infrastructure during the past decade. Political consultant Joe Mecurio says the result is that the party is now on the defensive.

MECURIO: They've been embattled in trying to keep seats rather than growing the party membership and growing the number of elected officials and nobody's really, Pataki, Giuliani, Bloomberg, Bruno- none of them have cultivated a farm team of candidates and none of them has grown the party rank and file in a way that can support major elections.

REPORTER: Joseph Mondello, the newly elected chairman of the New York Republican State Committee acknowledges that the party stepped away from their traditional platform of lower taxes, smaller government and less spending. Democrats have bigfooted them on some of these issues.

MONDELLO: The Democrats have moved much further to the right then they ever were before and they clouded the differences between the Republicans and Democrats and it's up to us to show what we stand for...

REPORTER: Mondello says he plans to resurrect the party by building a strong, voter grass roots operation, seek more money from the national party and recruit young political talent. He predicts his party will make a comeback especially if a Republican wins the White House in 2008.

But political observers say Republicans shouldn't hold their breath. With the overwhelming margin of Governor Eliot Spitzer's victory and Democrats sweeping into offices across the state, they say it could be more than a decade before New York state Republicans rise again. For WNYC, I'm Elaine Rivera.