Losing NY-23 may be the first step toward victory for Northeastern Republicans.

Doug Hoffman’s congressional race was watched very closely by conservatives across the region, people like Jennifer Horn of New Hampshire’s 2nd District.

Horn, an outspoken conservative and a tea-party Republican, ran for the seat last year against Democrat Paul Hodes, and lost. Now Hodes is running for the U.S. Senate, and Horn is a candidate for the open seat.

So is Charlie Bass, the moderate-to-liberal Republican incumbent Hodes defeated in 2006. Bass is the sort of GOP squish that drives conservatives crazy: in favor of cap-and-trade, in favor of gay marriage, voted to let minors be transported across state lines for abortions, and so on. He also held that seat for the GOP for twelve years.

The way Jennifer Horn sees it, Bass is going to play the establishment Scozzafava to her populist Hoffman candidacy.

But now that the Democrats have picked up NY-23 with 49 percent of the vote — the other 51 percent split between the Conservative and Republican lines — is that really the story Horn and other conservatives want to tell?

What New England Republicans need is victories. It’s hard to describe to outsiders the hopelessness that potential Republican candidates feel living in a place like Massachusetts. The state House is 90 percent Democratic. Ninety percent! There isn’t a single Republican in the state’s ten-member delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives — or in the delegation of any other New England state, for that matter. There hasn’t even been a competitive congressional race in Massachusetts for a decade.

Last April, I organized a candidate training school for Republicans and independents who wanted to challenge incumbents at the state and local level. About 125 regular citizens showed up, determined to run, but clearly resigned to the idea that they were engaged in an act of Pickett’s Charge politics.

Yesterday’s election results, particularly in blue state New Jersey, have given New England Republicans something they haven’t had in a long time: hope. Conservatives are starting to believe they can take that hill after all.

In Massachusetts, for example, supporters of Gov. Deval Patrick have been relying on knee-jerk partisanship and the presence of a third, independent candidate (the state treasurer, Tim Cahill) to keep the unpopular Democrat in office next year. But now his GOP challenger, Charlie Baker, is looking stronger, given that Gov. Jon Corzine had those same advantages — and a whole lot more money than Patrick — and he still lost.

Andy Smith at the New Hampshire Survey Center believes both of his state’s congressional seats could go Republican in 2010, and that the GOP can hold Judd Gregg’s Senate seat. Which would be very good news, indeed.

But still not good enough for Jennifer Horn. She wants the 2nd District to go to a conservative.

“Voters are tired of being told they have to vote for ‘Democrat-light,’” Horn told the Boston Globe. She thinks it’s the moderates who lost New England for the GOP because they didn’t stand for strong principles like spending restraint and limited government. The results in NY-23 put those ideals into a pragmatic perspective. As a talk-radio host who organized a tea party in Boston Harbor last year, I could find it easy to get caught up in the spirit and say, “Yeah, throw those moderate bums out! I want Newt’s head on a plate!” But Gov. Tim Pawlenty is right when he talks about “ranges of behavior” for Republicans across the country. Rob Simmons, running as a moderate for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut, wouldn’t be much of a Republican back in my home state of South Carolina. But it’s possible that in a race against the five-term incumbent, Chris Dodd, he’s about as good as you’re going to get. Jennifer Horn is a solid conservative and a terrific candidate. But can she win a general election in New England? The good news for conservatives is that there is a limit to the “range of behavior” on the left. That’s the lesson of Scozzafava. Republicans can be pushed only so far, and if the “smart guys” running the GOP try to foist a hard liberal on Republican voters, they will balk. The results of this election cycle show that the voters most motivated to vote at the moment are open to more conservative candidates than they’ve been in the last three election cycles. What New England conservatives need to do is find strong candidates and get to work. And moderates should take a lesson from Simmons, who reportedly carries a tea bag with him to acknowledge how much he needs the passion of the tea-party movement to win next November. Is there a “war” between GOP moderates and conservatives? Maybe so. But we have a method for resolving these struggles: primaries. I know GOP leadership types don’t like them. But to see the alternative, stop by the new Washington office of Rep. Bill Owens, D., N.Y. – Michael Graham is an NRO contributor.