Even he needed a decade off and a bullet in two Kennedy brothers, and I doubt any Republicans want to relive the Nixon administration.

As for what the GOP does now, that is a very good question. The problem is this: 30-40% of GOP VOTERS are conservative extremists, especially in the reddest states, where they often form a large majority, but the people FINANCING the party are libertarians who do not care what color you are, whom you screw or what you do about any resulting pregnancies so long as we social spending annually so the budget balances without them paying taxes. Once upon a time, the GOP just sat on its social conservatives and told them "it is us or the Dems: Deal with it." Ask Cannoli some time how he feels about Reagan making pro-life Sandra O'Connor the first woman on the SCOTUS.

They cannot do that anymore because extremist conservatives form a majority of GOP voters in the most heavily GOP states. Therefore, in primary after primary they nominate unelectable "real conservatives," even at the expense of dumping incumbent "Republicans in Name Only" who would be unassailable in a general election. Dems could never have removed highly respected moderate Sen. Dick Lugar in very red IN: So the Tea Party did it for them in the primary, Richard Mourdock informed us that rape-babies are "Gods will," and now the next Senator from IN has a Dem Senator. Oops. Hence Republicans nominated hopeless Senate candidates like Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Linda McMahon (twice in as many elections,) Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle.

That is SIX races (again, McMahon counts twice) Republicans SHOULD have won handily, enough to turn the Senate from 55/45 Dem to 51/49 GOP, lost because party primary voters demanded unelectable radicals. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should have been beaten like a drum in 2010, but the Tea Party nominated Sharron Angle to run against him, and she spent so much time Mexican-bashing her own campaign manager quit in disgust.

The industry and financial moguls who pay for the GOP are sick of that crap. It has cost them two ideal opportunities to retake the Senate in as many elections, and this one was a gimme: Democrats were defending 23 seats to the Republicans 11, outspent 3:1, yet managed to NET 2 seats thanks to the party base foisting extremists on it. The only decent Senator the GOP had, Maines Olympia Snowe, said outright she was retiring because the radical partisanship is so nauseating.

I do not know where the GOP goes from here; when the shoe was on the other foot in the '70s and '80s Dems responded with the Democratic Leadership Council, an American New Left initiative that produced the Clintons, Gore and Lieberman and left US liberals without a party.

Right now the only silver lining for Republicans is that, even though Dems beat them by half a million votes in House races, they kept the House thanks to last elections Republican wave happening to coincide with a census year. If Republicans had not been redrawing House district boundaries even in blue states like PA, we would almost be back where we were in 2008: Dems run everything but the SCOTUS.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/11/07/1159631/americans-voted-for-a-democratic-house-gerrymandering-the-supreme-court-gave-them-speaker-boehner/?mobile=nc