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With a rainbow coalition of voters propelling President Obama to a decisive Electoral College victory in which all but one battleground state turned blue, election night 2012 was a wake-up call for many Republicans. Now, the GOP is beginning to delve into a long and likely divisive period of self-examination over what it can do to right itself with a rapidly changing America.

The consensus among many top Republican strategists and politicos, from Karl Rove to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to Sen. Marco Rubio is this: If the GOP can't rebuild a foundation more welcoming to key subsets of the electorate, it runs the risk of being shut out of the White House for good.

"Our party needs to realize that it's too old and too white and too male, and it needs to figure out how to catch up with the demographics of the country before it's too late," Al Cardenas, head of the American Conservative Union, told Politico after the election. "Our party [has] a lot of work to do if we expect to be competitive in the near future."

If the goal is straightforward, however, the course is anything but. How does the GOP bridge that waning demographic gap exposed by the election and recalibrate its message to a changing electorate? How does it preach change to a staunch base of party faithful? How does it embrace a more colorful coalition of voters without alienating its fundamental values or its base? These are the difficult – and divisive – questions that the Republican Party will be grappling with for years to come.

But grapple it must, warns Republican strategist Ford O'Connell, "or else [it will be] wiped off the electoral map."

That process begins with diagnosing what, exactly, went wrong Nov. 6. Many party activists interpret the election's close split in popular vote as evidence that the fundamentals of the party are solid. These individuals, including Rush Limbaugh and tea party activist Matt Kibbe, say the problem was the candidate, not the party. If anything, they say, the GOP must become more conservative.

"We wanted a fighter like Ronald Reagan who boldly championed America's founding principles," Tea Party Patriots cofounder Jenny Beth Martin told The Dallas Morning News shortly after the election. "What we got was a weak, moderate candidate, handpicked by the Beltway elites and country club establishment."

Citing the roughly 51 percent to 49 percent split in popular vote, Republican consultant Matt Mackowiak says Mitt Romney's loss was not a repudiation of conservative ideals, but a cautionary tale about superior Democratic campaigning.

"Conservatives don't feel like conservatism lost. Conservatives feel like they nominated another establishment, moderate nominee and came up short," he says.

That line of reasoning is self-destructive, says John Hudak, an analyst in governance studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"People who think it was Mitt Romney's fault that Republicans lost and not the Republican brand don't have a full grip on demographic realities," Mr. Hudak says. "If they don't settle on the idea that they have a demographic problem, they will be demographically barred from controlling the White House."Excerpts from http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2012/1121/Rebuilding-the-GOP-Can
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Consider the numbers: The president won Latinos 71 percent to 27 percent, Asians 73 percent to 26 percent, gays and lesbians 77 percent to 23 percent, and blacks 93 percent to 6 percent. Single women gave 68 percent of their vote to Mr. Obama and voters under age 30 gave him 60 percent of their vote. All are growing sectors of the electorate.

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"The GOP cannot continue to engage in fire-and-brimstone rhetoric with respect to social issues," O'Connell says. "The GOP mantra for the past decade has generally been, 'Our way or the highway.'...

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"I don't know necessarily that [the party] needs to change principles as much as it needs to change the way it communicates. We have a communication problem on social issues," he says. "[We need to] figure out how to better communicate, package, and sell our policies."

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"A well-reinvented Republican Party has to be the party of fiscal responsibility and fiscal pragmatism, and it needs to get away from social issues entirely.... Social issues will go the way of women's suffrage – no one's going to care about it. But we're always going to have economic problems. We're always going to have periods of recession in a cyclical capitalist economy. Brand yourself as an economic policy party and you do well."

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"That's their challenge," Hudak says. "Tiptoeing through a mine field."

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