WASHINGTON - On a typical weekday during baseball season, the grandstand at Nationals Park is a vast expanse of gray concrete and empty blue seats, dotted with spots of red where fans wearing the colors of the home team sit in hopeful silence. From Tuesday through Thursday last week, the stadium was a frothing sea of red, from grandstand to luxury boxes filled with VIPs munching on hors d'oeuvres. But this was a Red Sox red, and each of the three games of the Boston-Washington series set a new attendance record for the home park. Red Sox Nation may be a real phenomenon, but these fans were more likely to be New England transplants than outsiders who suddenly swooned over the Big Papi-led champions of the last five seasons. Since long before the Nation was a gleam in the eye of John Henry and Tom Werner, New Englanders have been colonizing Washington. There were ballpark-related fund-raising events for Representatives Michael Capuano, Richard Neal, Stephen Lynch, and many others, including both Rhode Island congressmen, according to news reports. Rasky Baerlein, the Boston PR firm with close ties to Vice President Joe Biden, had a big New England party at Nationals Park. There were Boston-bred White House staff members, lobbyists, and government contractors. And all of them, watching the crowds of 40,000-plus roar for the Red Sox in the Nationals hometown, were marveling, no doubt, at the connection between Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. The strength of the Boston-to-Washington axis can be measured by the 63 nonstop flights scheduled to leave Logan Airport today for one of the three airports in the Washington area. If the airports in Manchester, N.H., and Providence, both advertised as alternatives to Logan, are included, the number of daily departures to Washington swells to 98. By a conservative estimate, that's enough seats for 8,000 people to go back and forth in a day. The endurance of this link comes from three sources: the large numbers of New England academics called to Washington to oversee various policy offices; the vastly disproportionate influence of the Massachusetts delegation in the House and Senate; and the large industry of political consultants who cut their teeth in the precincts of Boston. In Massachusetts, senators and representatives must climb through a dense and highly competitive political culture to reach their high office. But thanks to the dominance of the Democratic Party, they tend to stay in office for a long time, without much threat of a serious challenge. This allows them to concentrate their political energy on gaining clout in Congress. And New England voters encourage - and even expect - their representatives to play a leadership role in national issues. In other regions, taking a post like chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John F. Kerry's current perch, can be a political liability; voters at home assume that by concentrating on foreign policy, their senator is neglecting them. The same is true of many other leadership positions. But in Massachusetts, voters take pride in the clout of committee chairmen Barney Frank and Ed Markey, the surpassing influence of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and even the national ambitions of former governor Mitt Romney. (His distancing of himself from Massachusetts during last year's campaign didn't win him many hometown fans, but few Bay Staters question whether a former governor of Massachusetts is well qualified for the presidency.) Then there are the many political operatives who emerge from the Boston culture itself. The Dewey Square Group, named for where its leaders made their start, is just one of the many Washington consulting groups led by Bostonians. And numerous appointees from state and local governments in Massachusetts have been called to the Obama administration, where they joined the scores of academics from Harvard and other universities filling top posts in the State, Defense, and Justice departments. The Boston-to-Washington axis is only an advantage for Massachusetts, in money and prestige. It enhances Bay State institutions and businesses. It ensures that the New England viewpoint - forged in the Revolutionary era, strengthened by the ideological movements of the 19th century, and given new force with each wave of immigration over the last 150 years - has its proper place at the seat of power. In fact, only in recent years has the region's baseball team come close to matching the success of its political team. Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. This is his final National Perspective column. He assumes his new post as editor of the Globe's editorial page in August. He can be reached at canellos@globe.com. 