Mike Huckabee was asked by Newsmax if he thinks the Republican party will eventually support same-sex marriage.

Said Huckabee: “They might. And if they do, they’re going to lose a large part of their base because evangelicals will take a walk.”

“I kept my mouth shut for two years because, hey, I’m a party guy. But you know what, at the end of the day, you say to yourself, they’re dumping on you, they’re crapping on your legacy, they’re giving you crap for stuff that they didn’t want to do in the first place — coalitions, expanding media, social media networks.”

— Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, quoted by The Hill, continuing his feud with current RNC Chairman Reince Priebus.

“We do have a platform, and we adhere to that platform. But it doesn’t mean that we divide and subtract people from our
party.”

— RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, quoted by USA Today, defending the Republican party platform.

“Everybody’s definition of a RINO is anybody that doesn’t agree with them 100 percent of the time, and I’ll tell you (the late economist) Friedrich Hayek would tell you right now if you find someone you agree with 100 percent of the time, somebody is not thinking — because rational human beings disagree.”

— GOP strategist Heath Garrett, quoted by the Marietta Daily Journal, saying it’s time to retire the word RINO.

Paul Begala: “The far right howled when the autopsy was released. No shock there. Did you really think people who deny evolution are going to adapt? The report shines a light on what so many Republican politicians refuse to see: a bridge to the past is a bridge to nowhere.” 

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.”

Peggy Noonan: “Iraq and Afghanistan have ended badly for the Republicans, and the party won’t really right itself until it has candidates for national office who can present a new definition of what a realistic and well-grounded Republican foreign policy is, means and seeks to do. That will take debate. The party is now stuck more or less in domestic issues. As for foreign policy, they oppose Obama. In the future more will be needed.”

Nancy Cook:
“The Republican National Committee may want to send a few extra copies
of the election postmortem it released this week over to Capitol Hill.
Judging by the budget blueprints put forth by congressional Republicans,
they didn’t get the memo.”

Stu Rothenberg: “The Republican Party continues to fracture more seriously than I expected following last year’s re-election of President Obama.”

“Instead of uniting the GOP’s various constituencies against the president’s agenda, Obama’s re-election seems to have encouraged Republicans to spend much of their time harping on their internal disagreements and fighting over how the party should be positioned for 2016 and beyond.”

Seth Masket: “The Democrats’ shift from being the party of white supremacy to the party of civil rights was pretty much a singular act in American political history. Parties rarely pull off a major shift on a hot-button issue (that’s what killed the Whigs in the 1850s), and indeed it was a very costly shift for the Democrats, breaking their electoral lock on the southern states and ultimately ending their four-decade run of controlling the House of Representatives. To be sure, parties do evolve slowly on some issues, but the parties are much better defined by consistency than change.”

“Oh, no question, I would clean his clock… Just one knock on the head. It’s done.”

— Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, quoted by the Washington Examiner, on if he could win in a fight with current RNC Chairman Reince Priebus.

Charlie Cook:
“It may not be too melodramatic to say that over the next couple of
years, the Republican Party faces a fork in the road. Following one
path, the GOP can seek to address what has gone wrong, the narrowness of
the party’s appeal, and the intolerance that has alienated so many
minority, female, young, and moderate voters that Republicans have a
hard time prevailing in federal races outside of carefully drawn
conservative enclaves. Taking the other road could lead the party over a
cliff in 2016, in much the same way Barry Goldwater led Republicans to
disaster in 1964.”

Rush Limbaugh dismissed the new RNC autopsy report that encouraged the party to modernize and argued instead that the party is not conservative enough, the Huffington Post reports.

Said Limbaugh: “The Republicans are just getting totally bamboozled right now. And they are entirely lacking in confidence. Which is what happens to every political party after an election in which they think they got shellacked.”

“References were made to people who were too old and moss-covered and that we need now and fresh individuals and ideas and thoughts, and I agree with … every bit of those recommendations and comments.”

— Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), quoted by Huffington Post, responding to Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) criticism of the Republican party.

“We’ve got a socialist in office right now — how’s that working for us?”

— Republican National Committeeman Henry Barbour (R), quoted by The Hill, while talking about the Republican Party’s need to improve its brand.

“I won, and he didn’t. We didn’t have to go through the hype and hoopla of press conferences. We just went out and did the heavy work of rebuilding the party coming off of massive losses in 2006 and 2008. So Reince is just being silly. And I understand that.”

— Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, quoted by the Washington Post, in an “increasingly ugly war of words” with current RNC Chairman Reince Priebus.