So I thought I'd start a thread about a subject I think we've all thought about: What will happen to the Republican party if Romney loses?

I can see it going in a couple of different directions:
1) The Tea Party takes over and we end up nominating an anti-intellectual extremist in 2016 (and in the mid-terms) who will give the Democrats four more years (my money is on Cuomo as the democrat nominee btw).
2) The Republican party sees a need to "moderate itself" even further and accepts ObamaCare as it won't likely be possible to repeal it once it is in place (just like medicare and SS). The 2016 nominee will be Jon Huntsman, and we will be back to the era when the Republican slogan was "We're like the democrats - only slightly better" (this was the Republican motto during the 60's and 70's). Oh, and Huntsman will lose to Cuomo.
3) The Republican party recognizes that while its views are (overall) correct, the spokesmen haven't done a good job relating to average people. Also, on the other hand, there are those who do a good job relating to average people, but whose extreme views and (most of all) inflammatory rhetoric scares voters away.

For those of us still hoping Mike Huckabee will one day be president, the third option is clearly the best one. The Republican party doesn't need to become extreme, nor does it need more moderation. It does however need a leader with strong character, which is currently lacks. And, it needs new ideas (FairTax for example) instead of rehashing of the old ones.

Sadly, I think the third scenario is the most unlikely one. With the new platform and delegate voting reforms, grassroot influence is likely to be equal to 0 in the next presidential election, and so scenario 2 is today the most likely one.

What about the rest of you? How do you think a loss in november will affect the Republican party?

The best possible outcome of a Republican loss is that party leaders will FINALLY get the lesson that they need to form a coalition that is comprised of conservatives of ALL RACES.

The Republican Party leadership sort of acts like blacks don't comprise 13 percent of the electorate and seem to pin their hopes on getting an unrealistically high share of the Latino vote. They don't understand how people who aren't white view the Republican Party - even people who agree with them on many issues. They act as though all they have to do is repeat Reagan's strategy in 1980, not realizing that even Reagan had much higher support from minority voters than Romney does now and won at a time in which America's demographics were different than they are now.

If Romney, whom I have no faith in at all, loses and the ultimate outcome is that a Republican Party emerges that offers conservatives of all colors and backgrounds less reason to fear it and more requests to join it, 2016 will be a much better year for American voters than is 2012.

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The Values Voter
http://thevaluesvoter.spaces.live.com

TheValuesVoter,

You make valid points, definitely. Here's the thing though: We need to win for that to happen. Let me explain: Blacks (and other minorities) vote democrat mostly because they are so reliant on government.

The solution is to win the white house and preferably both houses of congress, and then make reforms that will help minorities cut off their dependence on government. As long as they depend on the government, they won't vote for us.

Now, the GOP has additional issues when it comes to minority voters (such as adressing common misunderstandings about the party and adressing concerns of minority voters), but I think the over-reliance on the government that exists among minorities is a major issue.

If we don't do anything about this soon enough, it's going to become a vicious cycle: We can't win without minorities, but we can't get minority votes without being in government so that we can reform entitlement programs etc. And in the meantime, the democrats will make sure more people get dependent on the government.

That's my assessment of the situation anyway. Would be happy to hear what you think.

No offense meant to you, but, in my opinion, this is the most misleading and one of the most commonly expressed beliefs about why most blacks vote Democratic. The reality is that most Republicans don't have an understanding of why blacks don't vote for Republicans and thus have no clue about how to change the voting pattern.

I've written a lot about this before and still am working on my book on the topic. But, the reason that blacks and many other minorities don't vote Republican is more about a perception that the Republican Party is hostile or apathetic to them in addition to the fact that, for the most part, Republicans no longer bother asking for our vote. It's hard to win votes from people whom you don't bother asking to vote for you. And people don't ask because they have convinced themselves, without really understanding or having much familiarity with black voters, that blacks want "big government" and "handouts" - the latter of these being a notion that I find somewhat offensive but that I've heard countless Republican candidates repeat as though it were a fundamental and unchallengeable truth.

Most blacks don't vote Democratic because they support Democratic ideals or policies. In fact, many black voters struggle with the idea of voting Democratic because they actively oppose many of the things that Democrats support. But they don't see the Republican Party as a viable option because they think that Republicans are either hostile to them or not even interested enough to bother reaching out to them. And when I say "reaching out" I don't mean reaching out in terms of "pandering." I mean just asking for votes - the same thing that every politician does with every other group - farmers, business leaders, factory workers, suburban whites, rural communities. They show up and campaign. They are willing to be seen there and willing to bother asking for support. They don't just do it once or twice in the waning months of a campaign. They do it continuously and use those repeated contacts to build relationships. But for some reason - and probably because of assumptions like the one you are making - Republicans aren't willing to do the same thing with African American voters.

And because of this as well as their continual fading clout with other minority groups, the Republican Party faces an increasingly insurmountable demographic uphill fight in every major election. It's like starting a football game in which the Republicans start every drive on their own five yard line and the Democrats start every drive on their own 35. You can't hope to continually win elections when you write off 20-30% of the population as not worth contending for - even when a large percentage of that population actually agrees with you on the issue.

If the Republicans lose, I'm hoping that someone who actually understands why it is that people vote the way that they do - someone like Mike Huckabee - has a chance to remake the Republican Party into a conservative coalition of people who actively reach out to fellow conservatives of every race. If this doesn't happen, the GOP will eventually become completely unable to win national elections.

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The Values Voter
http://thevaluesvoter.spaces.live.com

I say, if Romney loses, and I fully expect him to do so...we should immediately start writing letters, emails to those conservative leaders who were reluctant to get behind Gov. Huckabee in 2008 and ask them to start early encouraging Gov. Huckabee to run. Most of them realize they should have gotten behind him then and maybe this next time out they will go for him. I think anyone would agree he would have done far better then Mitt Romney had he run this time around.

That's a good point Nrobyar. The whole primary circus with all the "frontrunners of the month" were really just people trying to fill the gap left by Huckabee. With him in the race, the race would have been Romney vs Huckabee from the beginning to the end.