Washington (CNN) -- Was it the wrong candidate, low voter turnout, a few dumb comments, a superstorm or falling out of touch with a shifting American demographic? Listening to Republicans try to explain what went wrong in their worse-than-expected election thumping reveals a party struggling to define itself amid continuing change in the nation it seeks to lead. "We have to allow for a period when it's going to be messy and in which there's going to be an attempt for the Republican Party to find its soul," noted Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. "It's a divided party, it seems to me right now."
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The well-known division pits a loud and powerful conservative base, fueled in the past three years by the tea party movement, against a once-prevalent moderate faction now relegated to wing status. Evidence of the competing camps includes several U.S. Senate races in which little-known tea party-backed candidates toppled veteran moderates in Republican primary races, then lost to Democrats in the general election.
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That dynamic in 2010 and this year -- which brought political punch lines such as Christine O'Donnell and Richard Mourdock to the national debate -- cost Republicans any chance of toppling Democrats from their Senate majority.