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The Republican defeat in Tuesday’s special election in Mississippi, in a deeply conservative district where, in an average year, Democrats cannot even compete, was a clear sign that the GOP has the political equivalent of cancer that has spread throughout the body. Many House GOP operatives are privately predicting that the party could easily lose up to 20 seats this fall.

Combined with the 30 seats that the GOP lost in 2006, that would leave the party facing a 70-vote deficit against Democrats in the House — a state of powerlessness reminiscent of Republicans’ long wilderness years in the 1960s and ’70s.