What Happens if the GOP Doesn't Take the Senate?

While most prognosticators are predicting that the GOP will take control of the U.S. Senate - something I fervently hope does not happen - there's been little discussion of what will happen if those predictions do not come true.  At the presidential level, each time the GOP loses, the lunatic base and professional Christian class lament that the loss was due to the GOP's failure to nominate a sufficiently conservative candidate (something I believe is a hallucination)Will we see the same thing happen if the Senate remains in Democrat control?  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the circus that could ensue if the Democrats manage to hold on.  Here are highlights:

[W]hat if, somehow, the polls are wrong? Seven Senate seats is a lot, after all. And with seven days to go until the election, any number of factors could go against the GOP, allowing the Democrats to retain control, if by the slimmest of margins. What happens then?

When asked about that scenario, one top GOP fundraiser, who has raised money for Mitt Romney and a host of Republican congressional candidates over the last several election cycles simply paused for several seconds, as if time was needed to merely wrap one’s head around such a dire outcome.

“It would be an unbelievable disaster. The party would be devastated. The fundraising would dry-up. It would just become suddenly non-existent.”

Making matters worse, Republicans say, is not just that enthusiasm for the party heading into 2016 would be diminished, but that the divisions within the GOP, which have simmered on a low boil for four years now (flaring up during the government shutdown and debt-ceiling face off) would at last break out into all-out civil war.

In 2014, party elders decided that the nation had seen enough of the Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnells and Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akins, and tried to keep the firebrands at bay.  They were largely successful, with every Republican incumbent or establishment candidate winning his or her primary.

But the Tea Partiers and grassroots groups will be looking for blood—even after following orders and standing down in 2014—the GOP doesn’t retake the Senate.

For the Tea Party wing of the party, a loss next Tuesday would have one obvious culprit: a GOP establishment that forgets to excite the base, which interfered in local elections, and which ran “Democrat-lite” candidates instead of opting for bold contrasts.

For the establishment wing, this would be precisely the wrong lesson. . . . establishment GOP figures say that if the party had not had these and other primary nuisances, they would have been able to put their firepower on the Democrats even earlier.

“I know the Tea Party guys will be saying at the end of this, ‘We could have 64 seats if only we had picked Chris McDaniel! If only we had gone with Milton Wolf!” said Rick Wilson, a GOP strategist. “And my response is ‘Crack kills. Consider rehab.’”

While scenarios where the party takes seven seats are a lot easier to map, there is still a chance for the Democrats to hold on.
What Republicans fear most is that a 2014 loss will provide a major boost to some Tea Party figures as the party gets set to hold its nominating primaries for president. Those like Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush who have urged the party to broaden its appeal will find little enthusiasm for their arguments, while hardliners like Cruz or Mike Huckabee become party saviors.

[S]ome Republicans have the opposite concern: that a win in 2014 will merely paper over the party’s weaknesses in a way that a loss would force them to address. Namely, the concern that winning a midterm in a slew of white, conservative-leaning states will mean that Republicans will cease attempting to broaden the coalition to include more minorities, women, and young people.

I hope the Democrats hold on for a number of reasons.  But an additional reason is so that we can watch with glee the civil war that will wrack the GOP.  The truth is that unless and until the Christofascists/Tea Party element is permanently defeated, the GOP will never evolve to face reality in the 21st century.  If failing to win the Senate begins this battle, then long term the GOP benefits by losing.