Bush made no attempt to enlarge the Republican Party. Karl Rove's electoral strategy was to energize the conservative base. Consequently, Republicans out-did one another to out-right-wing each other, which turned off even larger portions of moderates. (Democrats used to have a slim advantage among moderates and independents. In 2008, Obama won them 2-1.)

So now, the poor dears have a riled up conservative base, while any Republican with any political sense knows that the future of the GOP has to be elsewhere or else they will not compete as a national party for at least a generation. What are they to do? Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin at Politico:

But outside Washington, the reality is very different. Rank-and-file Republicans remain, by all indications, staunchly conservative, and they appear to have no desire to moderate their views. GOP activists and operatives say they hear intense anger at the White House and at the party’s own leaders on familiar issues – taxes, homosexuality, and immigration. Within the party, conservative groups have grown stronger absent the emergence of any organized moderate faction.

Republican operative Ralph Reed, the evangelical wunderkind who forgot that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom" and subsequently got caught in the Abrahamof scandal, "predicted that opposition to same-sex marriage would become, like abortion, a litmus test, if a lower-profile one."

He might be right, in which case the GOP will have taken yet another position at odds with the over-all trend in opinion among the electorate as a whole. For young people, the whole question is not even an issue, which ensures that, as time passes, the GOP will be more and more out-of-sync with the general public. The Republican Party is heading over cliff, and yet they continue to hit the gas pedal.

For those who believe in the checks-and-balances of a two-party system, this is not good for the nation. We need a credible opposition party, not one that continues to withdraw deeper-and-deeper into the southern evangelical swamp.