How to loose an election: look divided and self-occupied.
This rule isn't limited to a particular party or nation or culture. It doesn't matter whether you are a big or a small party, main-stream or fringe. This is a general rule for all democratic elections.
Look at national elections in other countries: It's always the same theme. When the campaigning focuses on parties as a whole, rather than specific politicians, the image of the party decides.
If your party looks undisciplined and divided, you will loose voters from your constituency because they will either vote for another party or (more likely) abstain.
Nobody would vote for a dysfunctional party.
Nobody likes losers.
This raises the question, what the republican party will look like a few months from now.
Will the main-stream republicans be willing to rely on the Tea Party-republicans?
Will the Tea Party-republicans be willing to work with republicans who don't share their extremist views?
If they don't, well, then they will earn the image of a party that can't get shit done.
And then the disgruntled moderate republican voters will stay home at election-day, unwilling to support the republican party but equally unwilling to vote for the democrat.
Just look around to other nations. It's a pattern.
Unless republicans can dig up some charismatic politicians to deflect attention from their party-performance, they are doomed with empirical certainty to have lower republican voter-turnouts in 2014.
