re: #41 Alexzander

Is that ideal for a future GOP? I am asking in earnest. Can the GOP maintain a competitive percentage of US support without this segment? What does sort of party do you ideally imagine the GOP being in five or ten years?

I still sit left of the the progressive sides of the GOP so it is not really my concern but I have to wonder how others see things shaping in an ideal world.

Nor mine - however I will say that this seems to me to be a similar question to one that the Labour Party here in the UK had to ask itself following Thatcher’s landslide election win in 1979. Initially, their reaction was to appease the extreme left wing ‘core’. They made Michal Foot their leader, and embraced a whole raft of fringy positions, ignoring all advice about the changing nature and attitudes of the electorate. They spent the next 18 years in the political wilderness. It was not until Tony Blair modernised and reformed the party and brought it to a much more electable, centrist position that they returned to power. I imagine the GOP is going to have to go through a similar process, and as with the UK labour party, it may take a long time to come back from where they are at the moment.