If this happens, then there will be interest in other parts of the country.

I expect at least initially there will be sniping about the need to maintain party unity, and how votes for 3rd party candidates are a 'waste', but the animosity is too great to pull it back together again.

The biggest problem is the interference of religion into what ought to be a secular government for all peoples.  Why do our candidates have to parade their faith?  Go to a church for photo ops?  Let bible-thumpers write party planks?  Earn the approval of pulpited bigots and their broadcast network?  This affects the Democrats, too, but not quite to the extreme extent that the Republicans are infected.  (Religious Fervor is a plague that will kill its host... but sickens all around in the meanwhile.)

Yes, Obama went to the Saddleback debate.  McCain cheated.  Warren helped McCain cheat.  Did that Trial by Word help prove Obama's Christianity?  Nope.  Half the evangelicals still think he is a Muslim!  And what the hell does that have to do with good government?  Or character?  Or competence?

We'll forgive wholesale murder and ethnic cleansing... overlook the robbery of the Treasury and the corruption of no-bid contracts and cronyism in every last damned agency of the Government (one key reason WHY LIEBERMAN MUST GO is the total failure to hold a single Committee meeting)... let the infrastructure crumble into dust without raising a peep.  However, let somebody get caught with a teenage boy or a high-priced whore and the entire nation gets their own panties in a twist.

Republicans claim they stand for "the sanctity of life", but that is absolute bullshit.  They wage illegal wars, including torture and secret prisons.  They support the death penalty.  They ignore starving and sick children here in America, and let disabled vets sleep in their own urine or under bridges.  They buy arsenals of assault weapons and give guns to their children for Christmas.  They even support forced sterilization of poor black women or the mentally disabled, under the rubric that it will reduce crime.  Death and more death.  What else can be expected out of a people who celebrate an imaginary victimhood?

Is "life" only esteemed, guarded, valued while it is unformed potential in a womb?

It isn't that they hold eggs and sperms and zygotes as sacred, but that they want to control all sex and reproduction for the entire populace.  If Catholics and Mormons are reproducing like rabbits, but the rest of the country isn't, maybe they'll become the homogenous lily white society they long for: all listening to the same damned preacher telling them who to vote for and where to shop and how much to tithe.  Unthinking, because the thinking is done for them.

We've had a thousand years of Church and State being joined like authoritarian twins.  It is enough!!!

Unfortunately for Republicans, good governance is more than controlling marriage and childbirth.  Until they learn fiscal responsibility, accountability, management, negotiation, and how to prioritize long term results with short term needs... they will remain out of power.  And good riddance.

When they stop yapping about sexual matters and start thinking about climate change, local jobs, education, clean renewable energy, and ways to make peace with the rest of the world... then we can perhaps consider letting them back into the corridors of power.  

If they want to commit to a theocracy run by end-timers, they can stay in the frosty fringes until they become as frozen as those mammoths.