Bury me on the lone prairie

A glance at the electoral map shows that the Republican party has become increasingly a regional party, finding its home in three rough groupings of states:

1. The Old South, excluding Virginia and Florida, and (barely) North Carolina, with an Appalachian sailent running from Tennessee, through Kentucky and West Virginia, and up into southwest Pennsylvania.

2. The central plains, a tier of states stretching south from North Dakota to Texas.

3. Mormon territory, which includes Idaho in addition to the fatherland of Utah.

Other Western states, such as Montana and Arizona, voted for McCain, but are trending blue.

This division of the country leaves the Republicans in control of a lot of red acreage, as shown on the map, but much of that acreage is depopulating (the northern plains), or dying economically (Appalachia, and parts of the South).

If livestock could vote, the GOP would be in a lot better shape.

Republican moderates are now urging the party to repackage its traditional core principles of financial responsibility, small government, and individual self-reliance in ways that could appeal to a new demographic -- young people, blacks and Hispanics, and educated, suburban middle class voters. Something also needs to be done to reclaim traditional Republican blocs (such as business leaders and conservative intellectuals) that are drifting off toward the Democrats. But most Republican spokesmen reply that the party must swing even further to the right, and thus attract voters by force of its idealogical purity. A continuing hemorrhage from the ranks of corporate executives and conservative intellectuals seems almost to be welcomed by a party whose heart lies with small town and rural white voters.

Parties always pull themselves together after electoral disasters, and come back within a decade or two. But the current spokesmen for the Republican party -- one can hardly still call what's left "leaders" -- seem to show little interest in making such a recovery easy.