Dan Balz says the RNC autopsy report “lays bare the depth of the problems of a party that has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections and that is on the wrong side of the demographic forces that are changing the country.”

“But take it from some of those who have been there. The problems outlined in the frank report will not be solved by tweaks to the Republican message or by limiting the number of candidate debates in 2016 or without a potentially bruising internal fight that will pit GOP constituencies and leaders against one another in a debate over ideas and issues.”

Andrew Kohut: “In my decades of polling, I recall only one moment when a party had been driven as far from the center as the Republican Party has been today.”

“The outsize influence of hard-line elements in the party base is doing to the GOP what supporters of Gene McCarthy and George McGovern did to the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s — radicalizing its image and standing in the way of its revitalization.”

Robert Shrum says Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal will derail any attempt at the Republican Party to remake itself in the eyes of voters.

“Not long before the Ryan budget sailed through the House on a nearly lockstep Republican vote–only 10 Republican stepped back from the political abyss–one freshman member comforted himself with the notion that ‘it’s pretend … We know it’s dead on arrival in the Senate.’ But it will be very much alive as a defining campaign issue in 2014, and unless the GOP turns from its rigid ideology, in 2016 too. And so far, what’s plainly and decidedly dead, for all the Beltway blather about it, is the Republican makeover.”