Nov 6 should be a serious wake up call for your Grand Old (soon to be extinct) Party. If you look at the demographics, you see that the Democratic candidate won in the urban areas of the country, and Romney carried most of the rural areas. I think that’s significant. I think most if not all of the rural areas in the country are where you’re more likely to find the radical fringe, especially the Christian Right. But they don’t have the population to win a National election.  The South will always go Republican even if Charley Manson was the candidate because of LBJ’s civil rights laws in 1965, but the South has never been able to carry a big election either. You put it all together and you get Florida, New England and California. If the solid Midwest chimes in, that’s it, and that’s exactly what happened on Nov 6. None of the rest mattered.

Romney was genuinely surprised that he didn’t win by a landslide.  The sanguine predictions of GOP pundits regarding the probable outcome of the 2012 election were not based on anything but their humble personal opinions. They, including Romney, wanted to believe it so strongly they simply talked themselves into it as if it were gospel.  A variation of Hitler’s “Big Lie”. The Nov 6 results also show that whiny, demeaning and mostly untrue attack ads that Romney became famous for in Pennsylvania, sponsored by big money interest groups did exactly the opposite of their intent. They were simply an irritant and were ignored by voters, the ones that weren’t actively turned off by them. So interestingly, big money doesn’t seem to work. Eight billion dollars serving only to make TV stations rich.

The reality is that Florida, New England, the Midwest and California  will never support most or any of the right wing social programs even if they did like the concept of fiscal responsibility.   If the GOP puts the specter of Bush and the continuing joke of Palin together with the last slate of the 2012 GOP candidates up again in 2016,  they will behind the same eight ball, especially if Obama manages to improve the economy significantly in the next four years.

The GOP has some good ideas regarding fiscal responsibility and but their social programs will never fly in the new demographics of voters. Home lovin’, corn fed, pussy chasin’  white boys like you and I are no longer the majority in American society. Hispanics, women, blacks now turn elections. Most if not all of the self acknowledged “only real conservative”, Rick Santorum’s platform would get him shot dead within a month if he were elected. The GOP has to figure out what works now, and what doesn’t work, which means that the likes of Bachmann, Palin and Santorum need to be shown the door. The rest of the 2012 candidates are just plain silly and need to be shunned like the Amish do it.

The GOP needs to be re-thought and re-designed from the ground up. If they’re unwilling to do this, they will become a footnote in history.