Truman

Thomas Yunck has a good take on what the GOP is facing, and uses a bit of history to illustrate one way it could turn out:

"In '48 when Truman, though facing a sweeping defeat, decreed a robust civil rights plank for the Dem platform and Humphrey intoned that we must, in Lincoln's words, "do the right, as God has given us to know the right," the racists bitterly decamped. A body formerly known as the Party of Lincoln invited them in, gave them succor, and crafted a cynical "southern strategy." Bad move.

Though for a time they prospered, in the end the infection must prove fatal. This unholy union is now reduced to a mash-up of Dixiecrat legatees and fellow travelers: prairie gunslingers, anti-tax fetishists, end times Rapturists, militiamen and Millenarians, jingoists and misanthropes, survivalists and skinheads, and the odd secessionist witch doctor. The infestation has taken over the organism."