I don't think the GOP has a prayer.
The Republican party has, to my eye, collectively lost its mind. If you look at the Republican primary contenders, they're like a three-ring circus of reactionary, anti-intellectual nutjobbery, each clambering over the other to get the wingnut vote...and I don't think that any of them has a prayer in a general election. It quite boggles me just how far the party has gone over to weird, ideological demagoguery.
I can remember in my lifetime when the Republicans were the party of reason, prudence, and progress. It was aDemocratic president who pledged to get us to the moon, but the scientists and engineers and astronauts and accountants and researchers who made it happen were Republican, almost every one of 'em. But somehwere along the way, the Republican party became the party of anti-intellectualism, rejecting science and reason in favor of emotional rhetoric and superstition--and with the Tea party, who not only take anti-intellectualism to an extreme but have made good old-fashioned, in-your-face, we-hate-minorities-and-how-do-you-like-THEM-apples racism fashionable again, I think it's finally self-destructed. Die-hard Republicans are becoming embattled as mainstream America turns away from them--the Tea Party is being voted down in state and local elections even in such traditionally reactionary states as Arizona, and I don't think that the GOP can win a presidential election without mainstream votes. What works in a primary doesn't work in a general election.
