Not this year.

In Tampa this week, the Bay Staters will be front and center, the home-state delegation of Mitt Romney, the GOP’s first nominee for president from Massachusetts in 88 years. Romney is seen as having little chance of winning his home state in November, and many in the delegation hold beliefs well outside the Republican mainstream on social issues like gay and abortion rights.

But the Massachusetts contingent, no doubt still a curiosity to many, will enjoy the reflected glory of their former governor, who survived a tough nomination campaign during which he was derided by his conservative rivals as “a Massachusetts moderate.”

“There was always an assumption in other delegations that everything in Massachusetts is like Cambridge writ large; like everyone is walking around with a beret on,” said Peter Blute, deputy chairman of the state party who will not be in Tampa but has attended past conventions. “I suppose it’s like if you’re a Democrat, you’re fascinated by Texas.” Sixteen years ago, Blute and Peter Torkildsen were the last Republicans to represent the state in the US House of Representatives.

“This is the first time since Calvin Coolidge [in 1924] that we’ve had a Republican nominee from Massachusetts, and so I’ve gotten used to it over the years, all the good-natured beatings we would take because Massachusetts has not exactly been the hotbed of Republican politics,” said Ron Kaufman, a member of the Republican National Committee since 1988, veteran GOP operative, and an adviser to the Romney campaign.

With the Massachusetts delegation’s status come some valuable perks. Delegates will no longer be housed far from the convention center, having to endure a 45-minute commute from a motor inn out near the interstate or the airport to get to the action. The Bay State contingent will get prime seating on the floor of the Tampa Bay Times Forum and rooms across the street with the Romneys and party potentates at the posh 27-story Tampa Marriott Waterside Hotel & Marina.

And the party invitations will be better, the news media more attentive.

“Massachusetts Republicans have always been sort of exotic animals that Republicans from other parts of the country never really saw and couldn’t relate to,” said Rob Gray, a Boston-based Republican consultant. “They’ll be in the mainstream now at the convention with Romney as the nominee.”

The exalted status this year’s GOP delegation is enjoying is fairly routine for their Democratic counterparts from Massachusetts. Starting with John F. Kennedy in 1960 and continuing through Michael S. Dukakis in 1988 and John F. Kerry in 2004, the Bay State has churned out Democratic standard bearers with regularity. In that time, Republicans had only a Bay State nominee for vice president in Henry Cabot Lodge in 1960. George H.W. Bush, the 41st president, was born in Milton, but his parents moved to Connecticut about a year later.

How removed has Massachusetts been from the center of the Republican universe? Scott Brown will be the first sitting GOP senator from the state to attend a national convention since Edward W. Brooke, who was defeated for reelection in 1978 by Paul E. Tsongas, another Democrat who ran for president, losing the nomination to Bill Clinton in 1992. Brown, facing a tough reelection fight in the fall, will make a brief appearance in Tampa for Romney’s acceptance of the nomination and will not have a speaking role.

These quadrennial gatherings can be tricky or useful, depending on the politics and the messages generated for consumption back home. In 1984, Ray Shamie used the Dallas convention to pummel early favorite Elliot L. Richardson, his rival for the Republican Senate nomination. Shamie won the primary but lost to Kerry.

In 1996, then governor William F. Weld used the confab in San Diego to campaign vigorously but futilely for abortion rights in the party’s platform plank, courting the attention of the Boston news media covering the proceedings. He was in a tough and ultimately unsuccessful fight to unseat Kerry.