In the 1960's the Republican party got caught up in the "southern strategy" which was actually about racism but was billed as a "values" cause (mostly southern baptist/fundamentalist christian values)
then in the 80s this broke into a nationwide conservative movement. The contract with america and all that hullaballoo.
Now, after excretremacizing (wow I just made that up!) themselves into a political corner, a significant portion of their base is unable to follow the political convention of the country (becoming more moderate)
so they are trapped. they will lose either the moderates and lose or they will lose their conservative base and lose.
in either case the current republican party is finished for a generation.
Starting with Goldwater and Wallace in the late 60's the Republican party found that they could access considerable numbers of white southern voters by tapping into racial bias and fear of equal rights. By championing "state's rights" and "law and order" they spoke in a kind of right-wing racist code.
Since the civil rights movement the southern strategy has been more or less successful, winning the southern states for the republicans most of the time, except for Jimmy Carter in 1978.
With Ronald Reagan moving into the picture in the early eighties, Replublican strategists realized that there was a growing fundamintalist evangelical christian movement that was gaining political momentum. This christian revolution was essentially a cultural backlash to the 60's and the excesses that occurred then. In fact, it was made up of "jesus freaks", hippie dropouts that took up religion and reformulated a new form of christian modernism. (see: calvary chapel
the calvary chapels and their related modern fundamentalist evangelical bodies boast a congregation of over 5 million, often in very large churches every Sunday.
Prior to the 1980's it was anathma to preach politics from the pulpit. After the "moral majority" of Jerry Falwell and the works of James Dobson of Focus on the Family, The Republican political machine became a fine-tuned engine of fiscal conservatives/big-business types, the religious right and their wacky expectations for western decline as a precursor to the "end times", and the racists who are stocking up weapons for the coming "race war".
The problem with this is that it relies on a very large proportion of disenfranchised voters (mostly people of color) to not participate in the electorate. And, since their policies are focused toward a minority of the population, their success leads inevitably to a growing dissatisfaction with their party's operations. Not only that, but with the shifting demographics in the United States, most high population centers now have whites as a minority when compared to non-whites, and a fundamental shift away from religious conservatism as more and more religious/political leaders are exposed as hypocrites.
(Ralph Reed) didn't want to talk about why he lost, but those who know him say he blames the media--particularly the Atlanta Journal-Constitution--for their extensive coverage of his business ties to Abramoff, his friend from their days running the College Republicans in the early 1980s. For a high-profile religious conservative like Reed, the stories of being paid millions by one Indian tribe to run a religious-based antigambling campaign to prevent another tribe from opening a rival casino made him look like something worse than a criminal--a hypocrite. He had once called gambling a "cancer" on the body politic. And the e-mails to Abramoff didn't help, especially those that seemed to suggest that the man who had deplored in print Washington's system of "honest graft" was eager to be part of it. "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!" he wrote Abramoff a few days after the 1998 election.
With the inevitable backlash against George W and Dick Cheney a modern push against extremist ideologies have severely compromised the Republican party. Suddenly, a majority of their party's affiliations are waking up to the fact that the extremist minority is actually a hate-filled bunch of wingnuts. The more that time progresses and as the Obama Administration brings together more and more successes on the domestic economic and international relations fronts, the more popular he will become and the more isolated the fundamentalist extremist rightwingers will appear.
And the more that this will turn off moderate republicans and libertarians.
So, cut off the extremists? right? well it turns out that economically and manpower wise, this group would represent cutting off their Right Hand. They would cease to function as a political party if they turned off their religious right. This is why Joseph Leiberman was not chosen by McCain as his running mate. It would have driven an impossible schism between the party. Forever separating the racists and the religious conservatives from the social conservatives and the big-business party members.
In the end, this poor republican party has no where left to turn. They have to make some hard decisions. Either cut off their right hand and become a moderate party a la McCain.
or
Continue down the path of extremism, hoping and praying for some kind of catastrophe to rally the forces of fear and hatred to their cause (or maybe even the return of JESUS!!!).
Neither are very likely and so the real response will be a slow meandering decline/separation of the Republican party into a religious/racist party and a libertarian party with a profile portrait of Ayn Rand on their coat of arms.
in any of the above cases, the Republican party has become IRRELEVANT for the next 25 years or so.
Remember, if they had allowed McCain to pick Lieberman for is Veep, instead of Sarah Palin, They would most likely be in the oval office today.