Calm down -- and start building a bigger tent.

That's the bottom-line message Tom Ridge has for hyperventilating Republicans sorting through the wreckage of their defeat at the polls on Nov. 4.

"Just take a deep breath and exhale slowly," said Mr. Ridge, former Pennsylvania governor and U.S. homeland security secretary. "Forget about the finger-pointing, and start figuring out the way to a future that makes us relevant not just to our traditional constituency but to independents and independent-thinking Republicans and Democrats."

Not so fast, countered Sean Hannity, don't call in the tent construction crews just yet.

"We need to be more conservative, not less," the Fox News commentator said in a phone interview. "Ridge says we need to broaden our base? We already have," he chortled, "because Ridge, a pro-choicer, is in the party. And look where that got us."

In the wake of the resounding Democratic victory by Sen. Barack Obama, Republicans are engaging in the losing party's ritualistic exercise of recrimination, re-examination and rebuilding.

They have some serious work to do. The Grand Old Party has not only lost the White House but also -- as a result of 2006 and this year -- nearly 60 seats in the House and 12 seats in the Senate.

It's a far cry from just a few years ago, when the GOP controlled all three branches of government and Karl Rove, architect of President George W. Bush's two victories, was promising to create a permanent Republican majority.

That's all gone now, but party officials meeting at the Republican Governors Conference in Miami last week were already looking ahead two years hence.

"The future is not that 2012 presidential race; it's next year and our next budgets," said a resolutely upbeat Sarah Palin, the party's vice presidential nominee this year. In 2010, the Alaska governor said, "we'll have 36 governors positions open."

While there will be calls to veer rightward or to "modernize" the party, said Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota said, "the good news is both are true, and both can be harmonized in my view," Mr. Pawlenty said. "We can be both conservative and we can be modern at the same time."

Can they? Was the Nov. 4 debacle a repudiation of Republican ideology or just a case of bad luck and bad timing? Is this the end of a conservative cycle born out of the ashes of Barry Goldwater's 1964 defeat, a cycle that peaked with Mr. Reagan's 1980 election and began a slow decline in 1992 when Bill Clinton won the White House?

"Our political parties have been declared dead or moribund before," said Peter Fenn, a Washington, D.C.-based political strategist who served as director of Democrats for the '80s, an influential policy think tank for demoralized Democrats.

"There's a temptation to say, that's it -- the Republicans will never come back. But they came back in 1968, four years after Barry Goldwater's loss. And Democrats, who were called the party of amnesty, acid and abortion in 1972, came back in 1976 after Watergate, and then, Ronald Reagan proved a lot of people wrong."

"We don't need to completely throw out Republican ideals," added Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University who worked for both the second President Bush and Mr. Clinton. Republicans have to focus on "the concerns of average Americans, many of whom consider themselves to be moderate. The Republican Party has to show them they have compelling answers for the problems people say are uppermost in their lives.'

Nonetheless, the blame game is in full swing: John McCain ran an erratic campaign; Ms. Palin, his running mate, was a drag on the ticket -- or boosted it but was badly served by McCain staffers; the media didn't ask Mr. Obama the tough questions; the Wall Street meltdown made it impossible for the incumbent party to win.

And that's just the pundits arguing on television and in cyberspace. Pollsters are already unearthing other explanations, some of them contradictory.

A pre-election survey of voters in Colorado, Florida, Ohio and Virginia -- states that all shifted from red in 2004 to blue this year-- found that 72 percent agreed that "the Republican Party used to stand for keeping government spending under control ... but not anymore," with another 75 percent agreeing that the GOP had failed to reform government and clean up corruption.

"The American people do not really know what the GOP stands for anymore," said Ed Martin, president of the American Issues Project, a third-party group that advocates for conservative issues and that conducted the survey. While the electorate hasn't shifted to the left, an overwhelming number of conservative voters polled decided the GOP has lost its way and gave a huge edge to Democrats on fiscal issues, he said.

On the other hand, another survey of Republican voters by Democracy Corps -- a polling firm founded by Democratic strategists James Carville and Stan Greenberg -- produced an entirely different result. Asked who was to blame for Mr. McCain's defeat, 65 percent of those surveyed blamed a pro-Obama "mainstream media." Economic events ran a distant second, at 29 percent, and fundraising third, at 25 percent.

Only 12 percent of Republicans surveyed thought that Mr. McCain's wanting to continue Mr. Bush's policies was the culprit and 10 percent blamed Ms. Palin. Moreover, the poll found a real disconnect between all voters and Republicans. While "a sizable majority of voters say Republicans have lost in 2006 and 2008 because they have been 'too conservative,' a sizable plurality of Republicans say, it is because they have "not been conservative enough," Messrs. Carville and Greenberg said in a press release.

What everyone does seem to agree on is that core Republican beliefs in small government, low taxation, fiscal responsibility and strong national security are the key to success in the future, along with innovative economic proposals -- Mr. McCain's health care plan was one example -- and an embrace of issues that previously didn't get much traction with conservatives, from college tuition to global warming.

"Our brand has been tarnished in part because we have not consistently upheld our own set of principles" -- fiscal conservatism, competence, and strong on military issues, said Mr. Ridge. Instead, he said, "we've become too much of a litmus test party" on social issues.

Mr. Ridge would know about litmus tests -- he was blocked from the McCain ticket, it's widely assumed, because his support for abortion rights made him unacceptable to conservatives. Reconstituting a party is "always a game of addition and subtraction, and we need to do a lot of addition in the years ahead," he said.

"We need to be more attractive to more urban, minority [voters], and independent voters of either party. We need to be more practical in our approach to governing. Voters are looking for solutions and are tired of partisanship, and let's be very candid about what we had when we had the presidency and the House and the Senate. We were too partisan and not very effective in providing solutions. While government grew dramatically, we didn't mute the partisan edge -- we sharpened it," he said.

While the party soldiers forward, names of potential future leaders are already surfacing. Movement conservatives like Ms. Palin, while Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal -- smart, charismatic, pragmatic and multi-cultural -- is being touted as the Republican's answer to Obama. Jeb Bush is also cited, but his last name is currently fairly radioactive.

"Do you look to someone like a [U.S. Sen.] Mitch McConnell or [U.S. Rep.] John Boehner, or a thought leader like Newt Gingrich?" Mr. Fenn wondered. "I think the mood right now is out with the old, and in with the new."

Faced with such irreconcilable differences on social issues, however, some in the party are calling for a divorce.

"The Republicans have a simple choice," said John Zogby, the pollster. "If they want to continue to define themselves as conservatives, they'll be defining themselves into oblivion. If they want to save themselves, they may have to create a third party of moderates."

He noted that there are no longer any Republican House members from New England, and their numbers have been dwindling in the Northeast and Midwest. Even in the South, where the GOP is strongest, demographics are trending against them, Mr. Zogby warned, as the so-called creative class, "knowledge workers," migrate into North and South Carolina, Georgia, South Florida and into cities in Texas.

To be sure, "the reason why the Republican Party became the majority party was because it appealed to peoples' concerns about social issues," he said. "But they are just not the ascendant issues in this country today. Just as liberalism burned itself out after the Great Society, conservativism has burned itself out as a movement that foments new ideas," he said.

But Republicans cannot become too moderate -- as in dropping the party's opposition to abortion, said Mr. Feaver, the Duke political scientist.

"That's a recipe for disaster. If you make a crass strategic move like that, you will lose more conservatives than you will gain moderates," he said. "On the other hand, abortion doesn't need to be the centerpiece of political action. If they can find an issue that is compelling to moderates and sell that issue without compromising on social issues, they'll do well."

Robert Gleason Jr., chair of Pennsylvania's Republican Party, also sees little point in abandoning conservatives on abortion.

"There are still a lot of values voters in this country, but this time around a lot of them were more concerned about getting a paycheck than voting their values," Mr. Gleason said. In Pennsylvania, demographic changes in the Philadelphia suburbs, with more residents moving there from the city, remade those reliable Republican strongholds into fertile territory for Democrats.

Republicans have been steadily building strength in the western part of the state, he added. Mr. McCain won Beaver, Fayette and Washington counties, which had gone for John Kerry in 2004, and Westmoreland County, despite a Democratic registration advantage, has been in the Republican camp for the last few presidential elections. To the east in Chester County, a bastion of Republicanism, Mr. Obama won by 54 percent of the vote, but Skip Brion, the GOP chairman there, saw a silver lining. "We only lost two open state House seats by 500 votes," he said, noting that all the county's row offices remained Republican.

"I don't think the citizenry abandoned us. We held on pretty well considering what was happening at the top. I've seen all these articles questioning whether there is a Republican Party anymore but I'm old enough to remember they were saying that in 1964."

For Democrats, "the trap is to take this as a mandate for bigger government," said Dan Wofford, son of former U.S. Sen. Harris Wofford and a strong supporter and organizer for Mr. Obama in Chester County. "If they can frame themselves as champions of smarter government, strategic government, they will do better. I think they recognize that there are limits to interpreting this vote as some sort of sea change and they will govern from the center. If they don't, and overreach, that will give Republicans an opening."

Indeed, Mr. Gleason seemed already to be looking ahead -- to 2010.

"Barack Obama has a lot on his plate," Mr. Gleason said. "He's got to fail in some areas. It's just how badly he does that will determine what happens in two years. My strategy is to win the governorship -- and we still have Arlen Specter in the Senate."

Also, Republicans wondering if they need to reinvent themselves need to remember the question posed by Ronald Reagan in a 1975 speech, Mr. Hannity added.

"He asked -- and you can look it up -- 'Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?' I like that -- 'no pale pastels.' Those are wise words, and I think people need to remember Ronald Reagan."