If you go to 270towin.com, you can use their Electoral College calculator to play around with the results. What I want you to do is to load up the 2016 map and then try changing different states from blue to red until you find a combination of states that Romney lost that some future Republican presidential candidate might win that would be sufficient to win them the election. I’ll give you a straightforward example. If a Republican were to hold all the states that Romney won and add Florida, Virginia, Ohio, and New Hampshire, they would get exactly 270 electoral votes, the minimum required to win the presidential election.

But here is my wrinkle. Try getting to 270 for the Republicans without giving them Virginia.

There are a couple of possibilities, but they aren’t too promising. Simply replacing Virginia with Colorado and Nevada would do it, but those states’ demographics are moving rapidly out of reach for the Republicans. Maybe Colorado and Iowa would be a slightly more plausible bet. Neither of those combinations would work, however, if the Republicans could not win New Hampshire. If you take New Hampshire out of the picture, either the Republicans would have to win Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, or they’d have to flip a big industrial state in the Midwest that hasn’t voted for a Republican since 1992.

All these scenarios presuppose that the Republicans can carry North Carolina, which John McCain could not do in 2008 and Mitt Romney barely accomplished in 2012. As I said, too, these scenarios presuppose that the Republicans can carry Florida and Ohio, which neither McCain nor Romney were able to do.

Simply put, if Virginia becomes a blue state, any GOP candidate is going to be completely behind the eight ball. And that is why it is completely mystifying that the Republicans just decided to shut down the government and destroy their image and brand in Virginia. To see the kind of damage they did to themselves, go to Real Clear Politics and look at the graph that tracks the gubernatorial polls over time. Look at what happened to the polls as soon as the shutdown started. It isn’t entirely unpredictable, but the visual is nonetheless astounding.

The government shutdown was a suicidal maneuver on the national level. When you pair it with the House Republicans’ refusal to have even a vote on immigration reform, which will cripple them in Colorado and Nevada, they have almost handed the 2016 presidential contest to the Democrats before the candidates have even announced themselves.

I truly believe that if we could sit every Republican member of Congress down and explain exactly how badly they have fucked the party on the national level, that it might actually result in the kind of moderation that no amount of cajoling and rhetoric could achieve.