The Republican Party is eating its own, and the more thoughtful people are leaving the ship. See this story in Huffington Post about Joe Repya leaving the party and writing a very incisive letter to the Party about why:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Given Sen. Ensign and Gov. Sanford, the Repubs are cracking both at the top and at the bottom. It's likely that within another two years, if the Repubs don't recover at all in 2010 elections, that serious discussion and planning will start to create a new moderately center right party that is socially liberal but fiscally conservative, which will try to draw conservative Democrats and independents.
If a new center right party emerges, without the social conservatism baggage of the current Repub Party, it won't likely be able to field a viable presidential candidate in 2012 or even 2016, but it might be pretty successful in creating for itself a congressional block that holds the balance of power in all significant legislation. So if this new party emerges, it utterly wipes out the Repub Party as a credible national party, but in America we have a deep need for two competitive parties to exist, so I'd think by 2020 the new party would be a viable national party, and run a credible presidential candidate. By then the current Repub Party will have really withered, with most Republican state governors and a majority of current Repub Party congressional Reps and Senators formally switched to the new party. So the new party would not be a "split" or fractured offshoot. The really conservative voters would have nowhere to go but to the party choice which was fiscally conservative, and the Repub Party would just die completely.
I wouldn't join such a center right party, but I think it's emergence would be good news overall for the quality of political discourse, and possibly for the quality of legislation passed, too. What do you all think? Is this scenario likely to happen? And what should such a new national party call itself?