What happens when a right-wing party loses power in a crushing electoral defeat? That's exactly what happened to the Conservative (Tory) party in the United Kingdom in 1997.
After taking over from Thatcher in 1990, Tory Prime Minister John Major narrowly won the 1992 General Election. However, five years later things were not looking so bright. The country was suffering a recession, billions had been wasted on a futile intervention to prop up a key financial system, and the brand of the party was tarnished with scandal and sleaze, as well as a sense of overwhelming fatigue from voters. Opposing them was smart, capable and telegenic man in his mid-forties who had overturned the party he led in a bid to make it palatable to the media and thus to the majority of the voting public. Major's defeat was described by one professor of politics as not so much a landslide as "an asteroid hitting the planet and destroying practically all life on Earth".
The story of the party from here is shaped very much by the changes in its leadership. A British political party will have a leader not just in the run-up to an election but most of the time, and they are more than just Prime Ministers in waiting - they have tremendous power to shape the message of the party. Having lost the election, Major fell on his sword, but the party clung to the identity that Major had given them, and they elected almost-unknown Major-alike William Hague to take his place.
Hague's same-old message and xenophobia, with a little of the "compassionate conservatism" of the then-Governor of Texas George W Bush, didn't sell with the electorate who delivered Labour a second landslide in the 2001 general election. Hague followed Major's example and fell on his sword immediately, but still the party faithful could not let go, and elected more of the same not just once but twice. They didn't wait for another election defeat to realise that their next choice, Iain Duncan Smith, was unelectable; after a little over two years in power a vote of no confidence saw him replaced by one of Thatcher's right-hand men, Michael Howard.
Now Howard was just as unelectable as his three predecessors; the quip that "there is something of the night about him" from his Conservative colleague Ann Widdecombe fitted both him and the perception that voters still had of his party, and he was defeated in a third general election in 2005. However, Howard was also a much more able politician than any of those predecessors, and understood the need to turn the party around as Blair had done to Labour to present something voters could swallow. So rather than relinquishing the leadership on the morning of his defeat, Howard stayed on as leader for six months, and he used that time to try to reform the process that was picking curmudgeons such as himself and to promote younger "rising star" MPs who could be suitable leadership candidates to the shadow cabinet.
And indeed, it was rising star David Cameron who took the helm from here, and he turned out to be anything but unelectable. Cameron purged some of the policies and stances that voters were finding unacceptable; arrant homophobia, for example, which used to be a great vote-winner and centerpiece of several Tory gimmicks of the previous years, had to go because homophobia isn't selling nearly as well in modern Britain. He embraced other ideas that made the Conservatives seem softer and less out of touch, such as environmentalism; he even went as far as having a wind turbine fitted to the roof of his home, despite having described them as "giant bird-blenders" before he took his position.
Without any serious change in policy - indeed, while proposing several terrifyingly radical steps backwards in our welfare state, among other things - he persuaded the people that this was not the toxic Conservative Party they had known, but a kindler, gentler party that you need not be embarrassed to admit to supporting in polite company. And it's working. They have won several massive victories in recent by-elections, and barring major surprises Cameron will be Prime Minister following the next General election.
So there's one big negative lesson from all this; they will be back and they will win again. But there's also a couple of positive lessons.
First, there are a few ways in which they have emerged from this a little bit less evil; by voting for the other guys, the electorate has actually pushed them back a bit.
Second, it took them a decade of vicious infighting to recover, regroup, let go of the old brand and start anew.
I hope that it takes your Republicans a lot longer than that to come back from the defeat they see on November 4th.