GOP: Here to Stay

I agree with Noam Scheiber that the Republicans probably should evolve in a "Sam's Club" direction and also that they probably can't evolve in a "Sam's Club" direction. But this seems way overstated:

Having said all that, these guys are right: The GOP is absolutely screwed. Even though the money comes from the same place it has for decades, the votes increasingly come from socially-conservative working-class people. At some point something's got to give. I just think it's going to be the GOP--which will basically cease to exist--rather than the moneymen and powerbrokers.

In the real world, it seems to me that in terms of the White House and governor's mansions, there's just a natural dynamic that leads the parties to more-or-less alternate in power since bad macroeconomic conditions are very bad for incumbents and yet not something that can be uniformly avoided. Beyond that, from 1933-1968 the GOP was almost uniformly shut out of power in congress, and rarely held the presidency, but even then it didn't "basically cease to exist." On top of all that, I don't think this is going to happen but you can easily imagine a scenario in which Barack Obama takes power in 2009, the country faces some kind of foreign policy fiasco followed by a terrorist attack at home, and the GOP comes roaring back in 2010 and 2012 without changing its ideological stripes much at all.