Murphy win continues to resonate nationally

Time magazine leads its latest issue with an article portraying Republicans as an “endangered species.”

Right there in the second sentence, writer Michael Grunwald zeroes in on the 20th NY congressional district special election:

[Republicans] lost Congress, then the White House; more recently, they lost a slam-dunk House election in a conservative New York district, then Senator Arlen Specter.

Grunwald then hones in on the nut of the Republican conundrum:

And the electorate is getting less white, less rural, less Christian — in short, less demographically Republican.

I know this topic has been kicked to death, but Grunwald really lays out the GOP’s conundrum in stark detail.

I’m notoriously bad at predictions, so I’ll pose a question:

Is this really a cyclical downturn for Republicans — part of the natural cycle of American politics?

Or has the conservative movement actually gone off a cliff?

We’ll know more in November 2010, but in the meantime what do you think?

Is the GOP hibernating? Endangered? Comments welcome.