Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, speaking to fellow Republican governors in Florida last week, said the Republican Party is in deep trouble, losing its ability to compete in large swaths of America and ceding key blocs of voters to the Democrats.

Christine Todd Whitman, former Environmental Protection Agency head and governor of New Jersey, wrote in a column in the Washington Post that her party has been taken hostage by “social fundamentalists” and won’t recover until it becomes more moderate.

Area Republicans, however, aren’t as gloomy as some of the GOP’s national leaders. They believe the party needs to become more conservative — at least fiscally — rather than less-so. And they predict the Republican Party will recover to some extent even without changes because emboldened Democrats will drag the nation farther to the left than Americans want.

“Pride goes before the fall,” said Paul Bade, a Mankato resident and self-employed electronics repairman. “Republicans got very proud six years ago. The Democrats are now. ... I think people are going to discover that Democrats aren’t the answer.”

State Rep. Bob Gunther, whose district stretches from St. James to Blue Earth, said two bad elections in a row for Republicans isn’t necessarily an indication of future performance. After all, the 2006 election was held when the Iraq war was going particularly badly and scandals were plaguing the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress. This year’s election came on the heels of a sharp economic downturn.

“The economy had a lot to do with this election,” said Gunther, R-Fairmont. “For some reason, the president is to blame for that, and the current president is a Republican.”

Dire comments

Pawlenty laid out some sobering facts for his fellow Republican governors in Florida last week.

“We cannot be a majority governing party when we essentially cannot compete in the Northeast, we are losing our ability to compete in the Great Lakes states, we cannot compete on the West Coast, we are increasingly in danger of competing in the mid-Atlantic states, and the Democrats are now winning some of the Western states,” Pawlenty said in a speech to open the conference. “That is not a formula for being a majority governing party in this nation.”

Pawlenty, listed among possible future GOP presidential candidates, went on to talk about the party’s growing vote deficit in the competition for women, Hispanics, African Americans and less-wealthy Americans.

Whitman, a member of the Bush cabinet in his first term, focused on her theory about why Republicans are losing moderate voters. President-elect Obama won moderate voters by a 21-percentage-point margin over Republican nominee John McCain, compared to the nine-point win by John Kerry over Bush in 2004.

“Unless the Republican Party ends its self-imposed captivity to social fundamentalists, it will spend a long time in the political wilderness,” Whitman wrote.

Drifting off course

Area Republicans interviewed offer a different take on their party’s standing.