Well, that Permanent Majority sure didn’t last long.

Tuesday’s special election in Mississippi, which yielded an eight-point victory for a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Republican district, has signaled to all observers what we’ve known, or at least hoped for, for years; Republicans are doomed.

This has been the case for quite some time-the 2006 elections certainly seemed to indicate serious trouble for the Republican Party-but Mississippi pulled the curtain on the current sad state of the GOP. In the aftermath of Travis Childers’ election, it has become impossible to ignore or deny the fact that the Republican Party is on the verge of disaster.

The GOP had absolutely no legitimate excuses for losing this election, as DavidNYC wrote on Wednesday. They had a decent candidate (in their fashion), running in a strongly red district, they spent vats of money, used all kinds of popular surrogates which we couldn’t match, and engaged in the same tired old "Liberals are EVIL!" scarecrowery that they've practiced for twenty years.

None of it worked, apparently. Not only did they lose the seat, they got beaten quite badly. They tried everything to hang on to a seat that should never have been competitive in the first place, and they failed in grand fashion. It is the perfect indicator that the Republican brand is in historically dire straits-they’re in the worst position they have seen since 1974, perhaps since 1964, perhaps since 1932- and the nation is poised for a genuine Democratic ascendancy.

And everybody knows it.

The traditional media has noticed; indeed, as as DemFromCT notes, they can’t get enough of this new narrative about the diseased Republican Party.

And the Republican Party has most definitely noticed. NRCC Chairman Tom Cole, who will presumably take the brunt of the blame for GOP losses this fall, commented

"I think obviously when you lose three of these in a row you have to go beyond campaign tactics," Cole said, adding that it brings up the question: "Is there something wrong with your product?"

This is a rather remarkable statement, considering that just a few short years ago, Republicans truly believed that this "product" would enable them to build a Permanent Republican Majority, ultimately restricting Democrats to the status of a regional party.

Cole is far from alone in noting the grand failure of selling traditional Republicanism. Rep. Mark Kirk, a moderate representing a Democratic-leaning district (whose reelection bid is in serious trouble), feels the same way.

The GOP’s loss in Mississippi on Tuesday underscored for many Republicans that the party’s old playbook — one that relies heavily on branding Democrats as liberal tax-raisers, rallying around social issues such as abortion and guns, and using the president and vice president as campaign surrogates — isn’t working any more. "The playbook hasn’t worked in my district ever," said Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who has been pushing his party to adopt an agenda geared toward more moderate suburban voters for the past three years. "The politics of the 1980s when that playbook was written is out of date."

Even rock-ribbed conservatives, like rising GOP star Eric Cantor, understand the party’s need to rebrand itself.

Cantor acknowledged that efforts to brand a candidate as "too liberal" or "too out of sync" won’t cut it with voters. "What does work, though, is a realization that the paradigm has been shifted," Cantor said. "This country is tired of excuses and doesn’t want to hear about ‘too liberal’ or ‘too this’ or ‘too that.’ What they want to hear is solutions."

The paradigm has shifted, indeed. We are entering a new era in American politics, and the Republicans have to figure out how to live in it. Their old ideas, old tactics, and stale brand are hopelessly out of place.

Republican Rep. Tom Davis, one of the better strategic minds in the GOP, has gone so far as to raise the spectre of a permanent GOP minority:

Don’t just put a new wrapper on the product and hire a new sales crew. Let’s revamp, consistent with our principles and remember that this election is about independent voters. Even if we get every Republican out to vote, we lose without Independents. Forget the Democrats. They’ve been waiting to get back since the Florida recount. It’s all about the Independents, or we drop to a 170-180 seat permanent minority. Yes, we’ll be comfortable in our caucus, but we’ll be irrelevant for the next decade.

It’s particularly noteworthy that during their 12-year reign in Congress, from 1994 to 2006, the Republicans were never able to make the Democrats into a "170 or 180 –seat permanent minority". If the Democratic Party was indeed at its lowest ebb during the Bush administration, we’re actually in pretty good shape indeed.

So the GOP looks to John McCain as their savior now...a man whose entire electoral viability is centered around being seen as a "maverick", an atypical Republican.

The rise of McCain as their champion is not without irony, since the 71-year-old Arizona senator has quarreled with his own party for years on issues as diverse as immigration, campaign finance reform and global warming. But it is precisely that independent streak that is drawing Republicans to his coattails, hoping he can cleanse them of the stain of gridlocked Washington. Eric Cantor, Republican chief deputy whip in the House of Representatives, told reporters that the McCain brand was healthier than that of his party. "John McCain is a demonstrated vote getter among independents, and his message and what he will be able to do in this election is extremely important."

Frankly, the only chance John McCain has in this election is to keep selling the nonsense that he isn’t a normal Republican (and it is nonsense)...yet the party establishment is looking to him to help avoid disastrous downticket losses. McCain's job is to save the party...by running away from the party. The Republican brand is so toxic, at this point, that the only chance for GOP success is to eschew the brand of their own party label.

So, what the hell happened to that Permanent Majority? As DemFromCT wrote this morning, the true beauty of the special elections in Mississippi and Louisiana is that the Republican Party, the folks who once had designs on a Permanent Majority which would relegate us forever to the status of a regional party, have ultimately succeeded in transforming themselves into a regional party.

Their own hubristic eagerness to demonize anything and everything Democratic has ultimately backfired; it is the Republican party which is the extremist party now, and the Democratic party which is the coalition party.

Chris Cillizza breaks down the recent AB/WaPo poll:

Not surprisingly, Obama holds his largest lead over McCain (18 points) in the Northeast -- an area that has become increasingly dominated by Democrats in recent elections. But, Obama also holds a lead in the traditional battleground area of the Midwest -- where Obama takes 54 percent to McCain's 41 percent -- and in the Republican-leaning territory of the West where Obama holds a double-digit lead at the moment. And, even in the South, where Republicans have dominated at the federal level for much of the past four decades, Obama is competitive; McCain takes 49 percent to 45 percent for the Illinois senator. While McCain trails by double digits in three of the four regions of the country, he actually far over performs his own party's showing in the Post poll. Asked which party they trusted to "do a better job of coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years," voters across the country opted for Democrats by wide margins. In the Northeast, Democrats outpaced Republicans by 29 points while the margin was 26 points in the Midwest. The news wasn't much better for Republicans in the West (Democrats +18) or the South (Democrats +15).

It is the Democratic party which is making inroads into the West and South, while the Republicans have now failed to hold seats in successive special elections deep within the heart of their Southern stronghold. Even rural voters, long part of the GOP base, are abandoning the party:

Less than six months from the November election, Sen. John McCain is tied with Sen. Hillary Clinton among rural voters in battleground states while the Arizona Republican holds a nine point lead over Sen. Barack Obama.

Republican extremism has driven away a good percentage of the voters who gave them their narrow victories over the past 15 years. It’s easy to say that they should moderate their image going forward, and that probably is what they should do. Unfortunately, they’re hamstrung by their base.

Many things have gone wrong for Bush, but the underlying problem is his relationship to the constituency that elected him. Bush's debt to his big donors and to religious conservatives has boxed him in and pitted him against the national consensus on various issues. His extremism is undermining Rove's realignment. The problem has become clear with Bush's difficulties in filling Sandra Day O'Connor's slot on the Supreme Court. The Harriet Miers nomination was an attempt to satisfy both the militant conservative base and the eternally moderate American electorate. With the Alito nomination, Bush has acknowledged that splitting this difference is impossible. Faced with a choice, he has chosen, once again, to dance with the ones who brought him. But by appointing a superconservative, Bush risks propelling his increasingly beleaguered administration even further toward the right-hand margin—a place where his party cannot win future national elections.

The Republicans are in thrall to their hard-core right wing base, the Norquists and Dobsons of the world, and this prevents them from recapturing the political center, as DHinMI wrote in his piece on Tom Davis memo. Ironically, Davis’ own U.S. Senate bid was thwarted by the right wing of the Virginia Republican Party, who apparently preferred nominating the weak but reliably "conservative" Jim Gilmore to one of their smartest and wisest strategists.

Since the 1990's, the Republicans have been willing hostages to their base. Republican office holders are unwilling to go against their base, because they know they will be attacked by their base, and quite possibly targeted by fundie groups and Club for Growth, and most likely draw an extremist primary opponent (like the ones who've defeated Republican incumbent moderates Wayne Gilchrest and Joe Schwarz, and who blocked Davis' own path to the Republican nomination for Senate in Virginia). I don't have any sympathy for the Republicans. But I do believe it must be horrible knowing that if they don't eschew the extreme right positions they've adopted over the years, they will get slaughtered in the general election, but breaking from the extreme right means they will not make it through party primaries.

The GOP has fallen this far for a number of reasons, but chief among them is their failure to adequately court middle-class voters who aren’t completely hostile to science. Unfortunately for them, that comprises an incredibly large swath of the country. For some time, they were able to win enough of these voters to hold a majority in Congress and eke out two incredibly narrow presidential-election victories, but they were never included in the coalition.

It’s easy to forget that the Democratic Party was already experiencing a resurgence prior to September 11, albeit not on the grand scale we’re seeing now. Bush, of course, lost the popular vote in 2000, an election which saw the Democratic Party regain a majority in the U.S. Senate. Democrats also managed to gain seats in the House in three successive elections after the 1994 debacle.

The Republican seizure of the national security issue after 9/11 bought them time as a party, but it was hardly a permanent fix. For the GOP to hold national-security voters, two things were necessary; first, the issue had to remain the top voter priority, and second, the Republicans had to actually maintain their credibility on it (which, of course, they did not).

In all honesty, it’s likely that Republican dominance would have fallen even earlier if they hadn’t managed to seize the national-security issue after 9/11. Their mistake, however, was believing that national security alone would keep middle-class voters in their column. Unfortunately for them, their credibility on national security is spent, thanks in large part to the Iraq fiasco.

Now, in increasing numbers, these voters are finding a home in the Democratic Party. This is not because the party has moved appreciably to the center. Rather, it has become the party of the left and the center, the party for everyone who isn’t either insanely wealthy or part of the religious right.

Another component of the Republican fall is their eagerness to practice the worst kind of divisive regional politics. We’ve seen it in their most recent ads in Louisiana and Mississippi, assailing "San Francisco" liberal values. Have you ever seen a Democratic ad criticizing "Alabama values?"

Then there’s Dick Armey’s foul gem from 2004, assailing my hometown:

The state is also a recurring villain among Republicans, a view distilled in a wisecrack by a former House majority leader, Dick Armey of Texas, when Democrats announced that their 2004 convention would be held in Boston. "If I were a Democrat," Armey said, "I would feel a heck of a lot more comfortable in Boston than, say, America."

Strange, but I can't remember Ted Kennedy ever saying that Dallas isn't part of America. We don't do that sort of thing. Republicans do. Creating this us-and-them regional dynamic no doubt helped the Republicans lock down their Southern base, but it also prevented them from expanding into other regions of the country. It’s instructive that the party which wished to create a permanent majority thought it would be a good idea to do so by writing off entire sections of the country, and it’s no wonder that Chris Shays is the last Republican representative from New England.

I think the Republican dream of a permanent majority was always hubris. Their coalition was never that broad, and never that strong, even when they managed to win. And they didn't do a damned thing to expand beyond that coalition, to win new voters into their country by attempting to find common ground with centrists. At the height of Republican supremacy, 59 million Americans voted for John Kerry in 2004, and the GOP made no effort to court any of those voters into joining them.

One final note on the late Republican Permanent Majority. Karl Rove sought to be the new Mark Hanna, William McKinley’s political strategist in the 1896 presidential election. Hanna’s great achievement was to craft a Republican coalition in 1896 which reduced Democrats to being a Southern regional party, a status they enjoyed essentially until 1932.

Rove and his partners in crime have essentially done the same thing as Hanna did...for the Democratic Party.