In today’s New York Post, I take a look at the drubbing the GOP took out West and what it means for the party that’s left behind:

What does it all add up to? A party resting on an ever-shrinking geographic base: Dixie. Look at John McCain’s likely final 173 electoral votes: 113 of them come from the South (defined as the 11 states of the old Confederacy plus Kentucky and Oklahoma). That’s 65 percent of his electoral vote - and much of the rest comes from the sparsely populated Plains states.

With even Virginia and North Carolina trending blue this cycle (voting for Obama and voting out Republican senators), the need to expand this base is apparent.

So where does the Republican Party go from here? Three options present themselves at this early date…

…those are, broadly speaking: The Palin Plan, The Huckabee Diet, and The Bloomberg Scenario. Of course, my sympathies lie with the nasal New York-Boston Jew riding to the rescue of the Party of Palin. (If the Italian New York City mayor with a lisp couldn’t do it, damn it, this quixotic candidate can!)

I’m not saying it would have to be Bloomberg (once upon a time, Mitt Romney could have been the moderate, business-friendly, technocratic Republican — but he threw that all away to become the favorite conservative of National Review and Hugh Hewitt), but it would work best with a reformer/wonk from the West or Northeast.