The GOP: Where do we go from here?

“What went wrong?” said Gerald Seib in The Wall Street Journal. Republicans began the 2012 campaign fully confident that they could wrest back the White House from Barack Obama, but his triumphant re-election this week left them “in a cloud of gloom.” With unemployment at 7.9 percent and Americans doubting Obama’s economic leadership, Mitt Romney and the GOP should have cruised to an easy victory. Instead, Republicans find themselves caught up in bickering and second-guessing, and wondering what it takes to win a presidential election. “Romney not only lost, he lost decisively,” said Michael Tanner in NationalReview.com. In coming weeks, many will heap the blame on Romney, or on Hurricane Sandy, or on the liberal media, but if we care about our party, we can’t hide behind these facile excuses. The voters just sent us a message, and if Republicans don’t do some “soul searching” before the next election, “this defeat will just be the beginning.”

If history is any guide, said Jennifer Rubin in WashingtonPost.com, we’re going to hear many complain that Romney was “insufficiently conservative.” But look at what happened this week in the Senate: “Hard right” Republican candidates suffered a “near wipeout.” Doubling down on harsh social conservatism and absolutist rhetoric will not be a winning strategy. The American people have had it with GOP extremism, said David Horsey in the Los Angeles Times. As long as Republicans continue to let resentment-filled talk-radio blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and religious zealots define the party as anti-science, anti-feminist, anti-gay, and anti-Hispanic, “they are doomed to become a party of the past.”

Demographically speaking, the GOP may already be the party of the past, said Heather Mac Donald in NationalReview

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.com.Exit polls on Tuesday showed Obama with a staggering 71–27 percent advantage among Hispanics, the nation’s fastest-growing voter bloc. Mitt Romney’s hard line on immigration during the primaries certainly didn’t help, but most Hispanics also much prefer “the core Democratic principles of a more generous safety net, strong government intervention in the economy, and progressive taxation.” That presents Republicans with a real dilemma. Hispanics aren’t the only group Republicans have alienated, said Ben Smith in BuzzFeed.com. The electorate is getting younger and more socially liberal, as evidenced by this week’s votes to legalize gay marriage in three states. The GOP’s future will “be determined by how well it adapts to the brand new Liberal America—indeed the Obama America—that is now here to stay.”

As conservatives try to figure out what went wrong, here’s another question they need to ask themselves, said Conor Friedersdorf in TheAtlantic.com. “‘Why were we the last to realize that things were going wrong?’” In the final days of the election, all the polls showed Obama with a commanding lead in the battleground states and the Electoral College—yet the nation’s conservative commentariat almost unanimously predicted an easy Romney victory. For years now, this willful, almost gleeful denial of reality has been the rule, not the exception, “inside the conservative echo chamber.” In right-wing blogs, radio shows, and Fox News, conservatives convinced themselves that Obama was a Muslim Kenyan Socialist who hoped to destroy America—propaganda that the “rest of America dismissed as nonsense.” Whatever the GOP does to reinvent itself to win elections, those efforts will come to naught unless its conservative base is willing to come to terms with reality.