Josh Marshall is having an interesting discussion — partly with his readers, but also with himself — about the Great Republican Polling Debacle. It seems hard to believe even now, but all the stories indicate that the whole GOP went into last Tuesday in a state of complete delusion. It wasn’t just the Fox News viewers; it wasn’t just the Romney people; the whole party, base and establishment both, believed that it knew a truth hidden from almost every nonpartisan polling outfit, and that a big victory was virtually assured.

As Josh’s readers say, at one level this makes perfect sense. The modern GOP is very much into denial of inconvenient truths, whether those inconvenient truths involve climate change or macroeconomics. Why shouldn’t we expect a party that still believes in supply-side economics after the Clinton boom and the Bush bust to engage in voodoo polling too?

And yet Republicans retained for a long time a fearsome reputation for political prowess. How can these be reconciled?

I know that I’m not alone in believing that a large part of the answer is that they were never actually that good; they were just lucky. Remember, Karl Rove almost blew the 2000 election by wasting time on a triumphal tour — and Al Gore would have been elected with ease if it weren’t for hanging chads, felon purges, and a partisan Supreme Court.

With one exception, the GOP lost the popular vote in every presidential election since 1988. And 2004 was a “khaki election”, driven by war talk — better yet for the GOP, an election driven by talk of the “war on terror”, where voters had no way of telling how things were going other than the Bush administration’s own boasts of victory.

Suppose 9/11 hadn’t happened. I think you can make a good case that Republicans would have lost Congress in 2002 and the White House in 2004, and nobody would ever have talked about the permanent Republican majority and all that.

The big question, however, is 2010 — which will have a long legacy, because it gave Republican state houses the chance to gerrymander in a major advantage in the House. My guess is that it was a very contingent event: bad luck for Obama on the business cycle, compounded by his own team’s mistakes, plus a weirdly ineffective defense of health reform. But I’m sure we’ll have a lot more serious analysis in the months to come.