Is the Republican Party in peril?

The GOP opens its convention here Monday as a party in peril – hurricane or not.

Hobbled by an unpopular president, a disillusioned and divided base, and low poll ratings on almost every domestic issue, the party of Nixon and Reagan and Bush may well be at the end of a historic 40-year grasp on power, say conservative thinkers and political historians.

Republicans lost both houses of Congress in 2006. They were defeated in special elections this year in congressional districts that in some cases hadn't elected a Democrat since the days of Lyndon Johnson. And they are at risk of deeper losses on Capitol Hill in November.

Republican leaders in some states have struggled to recruit candidates for local office. GOP voter registrations are down. And there are signs of a generational shift that could play out over several election cycles: Nearly 60 percent of voters under 30 now identify themselves as Democrats, more than tripling the party's edge over the GOP in that age group since 2000, according to the Pew Research Center.

The man set to accept his party's nomination Thursday, John McCain, is a maverick disdained by the conservatives who turned Barry Goldwater's lonely cry against big government into a shrewd, sprawling, and well-funded movement. Whether Mr. McCain is the future of the party or a placeholder during a time of soul-searching hinges on the November election.

Cause for both hope and some hand-wringing among Republicans this year is that Americans like McCain far more than they do the party itself.

He distanced himself even further from the GOP establishment Friday with his vice-presidential pick. Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is a young, outside-the-beltway choice with a record of taking on entrenched interests.

Even so, many Republicans are bracing for a period of exile. A debate is already under way over its future, with conservative visionaries from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on down arguing about what it will take for the Grand Old Party, its best ideas now spent, to stage a comeback.

"The party's in pretty bad shape – it's gone wrong in so many areas," says Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma and the author of the new book "Reclaiming Conservatism."

"If the Republican Party is not thoroughly repudiated in this coming election it will only be to the extent that John McCain and some of the other Republican candidates have managed to distance themselves from what's happened over the last eight years," he says.

Their gathering in this Midwestern city offers a fresh chance for Republicans to make their case to a skeptical nation.

The GOP convention begins just four days after Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination at a Denver football stadium thronged by some 84,000 cheering supporters, some of whom waited in a line six miles long to hear his speech.

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