A key problem the GOP faces, post-defeat, is that there are a lot of different Republican parties out there under the same tent (ideological purges notwithstanding). There are authoritarian social conservatives, there are small government advocates both crazy-eyed and rational*, there are the big business interest-holders, and there are the party leaders.
(*I would argue this is the true "Silent Majority" base of the GOP, who simply want lower taxes and less government control of their lives. They don't wear funny hats, and don't parade in front of abortion clinics with fetuses in bottles, but are small-c conservative in mores and politics. They tend to be good neighbors and averse to ideological screaming matches. I think most are mostly quietly embarrassed by what the GOP has become, but still don't see a home on the Dem side of the street, so they're just sticking where they are and hoping things go back to normal soon.)
The party leaders — mostly, themselves, big business interest-holders, but also perforce pragmatists — have a problem, because they spent 2008-2011 co-opting the Tea Party types, and then finding, to their horror, that they can't reliably control them (losing a number of primary races to TP faves, who then lost in the general election).
The fate of the party really depends on how those leaders now deal with things (or who, over time, gets brought in to replace them, the ideologues or the true pragmatists). Their plan to keep Obama to a single term through rigorously enforced obstructionism in the name of the Tea Party simply didn't work. So what do they do? What can they do? Do they double down on an already-failed effort and hope to hold out until the electoral gods can smile on them again? Or do they risk revolt from the tiger they're riding and start making practical compromises to keep the party from being seen as even more extremist, to appeal to that "Silent Majority", and, oh, to keep the country from going off a cliff, too?
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Based on what I've been seeing, internally and locally, I'm expecting a crash and burn, unless they get lucky.
Well, it's been a half-century since the last major party upheaval (Democrats – Dixiecrats – Republican Southern Strategy), and the Whigs a century before that. Maybe it's time for the deck chairs to be reshuffled again.