Personally, I think it's the extremist "base" that's the problem for republicans, now, not the other way around. It's their fundamentalist religious base that's too out of step with the rest of the country, and as long as the republican party keeps trying to hold onto that extremist base, they're going to continue to lose elections. And my guess is that they're just now starting to fully realize this. They need to run moderates if they want to win elections, but their religious fundamentalist "base" won't accept any moderates. And what's worse, if they keep pushing extremist legislation, and spouting off religious extremist ideology (as with the whole rape/pregnancy fiasco) as they have been, they're going continue to lose legislative seats, too. And I think they are realizing that, as well.
So I suspect that instead of bowing to the religious extremists, as many of you imagine they must do, I think the republican party is going to have to begin distancing themselves from that voting "base", and replacing those extremists with someone new. Perhaps they will decide to make a real effort to gain latino voters, or even conservative black voters. I believe there is support for them in both those communities if they would make the effort to cultivate them. But it's clear that they can't keep leaning more and more to the right, anymore, without losing everyone in the middle. And these days it's those people in the middle who are deciding the elections.