The new state record is five — just five Republican Party members in the 76-member state Legislature.

Searching the records back to 1951, before statehood, the GOP has gone from a high of 32 out of 76 in 1959 to now just five in the state House and none in the state Senate.

The magic year for the Democrats was the 1954 election when, for the first time, the Democrats had legislative majorities in both chambers.

In modern times, the GOP was the political power in 1951 when it had 30 members out of a Territorial legislature of just 45 members.

In recent times, the GOP’s moment was in 2000, when the GOP had 22. There were 19 in the House and three in the Senate.

When I covered the Legislature in the 1970s, the Big Island’s Rep. Joe Garcia was the GOP House leader and, while he didn’t have a majority, he would brag in his stentorian voice that his band was “17 strong” and the Senate had another eight GOP votes — they meant something.

Now with last week’s departure of Mililani Rep. Beth Fukumoto from the GOP, the party is mostly in search of a reason for being.

Fukumoto, as close to a rising star as the GOP has had in a decade, was literally booed out of the party for her opposition to President Donald Trump.

Environmental attorney and longtime Kailua Republican, Rep. Cynthia Thielen, said in interviews last week that by hounding Fukumoto out of the party, her foes were “killing the Republican Party in Hawaii.”

Speaking on the House floor when Fukumoto was voted out as GOP leader by her own members, Thielen said, “The minority leader is being punished for participating in the Women’s March. I think that is disgraceful and appalling.”

Fukumoto caused the GOP to raise the party’s intolerance level to a new high by using the rally as a chance to call Trump a racist and a sexist.

“I thought our party could grow because of that, and now our party is dead,” said Thielen last week.

Thielen says she will stick with the GOP. Fukumoto, who is finding herself becoming something of a political Joan of Arc, is asking for membership in the Democratic Party.

A note of caution: When they want to be, Hawaii’s Democrats can be the absolute definition of the “Mean Girls” and become mostly a high school social clique, open to only the cool kids.

Interestingly, in January, Maui Mayor Alan Arakawa joined the Democratic Party. He had been a Republican, but the county position is nonpartisan and Arakawa had been mostly nonpartisan. In the last governor’s race, Arakawa supported Mufi Hannemann, who was running as an independent.

Arakawa has been rumored to be interested in running for governor, but there have been no formal filings or fundraisers from Arakawa. He is term limited and will be out of office next year.

The departures of Fukumoto and Arakawa are not the Hawaii GOP’s big problem. The problem is that its president is astoundingly disliked.

A Quinnipiac University poll last week had 37 percent saying they approve of President Donald Trump’s job performance, with 56 percent saying they do not.

Much of Trump’s record has been a series of lies and mischaracterizations, from saying he had proof Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii to having proof that Obama wiretapped his New York offices.

In Hawaii last year, 62 percent of the voters voted for Hillary Clinton, the highest percent in the nation. That is the GOP’s biggest local problem, and it is one they can’t solve by defending Trump.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.