What in the world is the matter with the Republican Party?

This is an election year when pretty much everything should be going the GOP’s way.

A Democratic president is facing the worst re-election environment in a generation. The conservative base is fired up to defeat him and should be riding high after securing the largest GOP House majority since the 1940s. Looser campaign finance restrictions have unleashed the ability of the party’s wealthiest donors to spend unlimited amounts.

But instead of a smooth ride, the party is experiencing the bumpiest presidential primary season in anyone’s memory, one that has at times seemed more a carnival than a coronation. It is all happening at a moment when the party knows it has little margin for error, given its fervor to bounce President Obama from office and its desire to incorporate the burgeoning tea party movement into the GOP fold.

The latest bump came last week, when former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania won three contests in a single night, a surprising sweep that revived his flagging candidacy and once again ignited angst about front-runner Mitt Romney.

Party fissures

Given Obama’s vulnerability, “it’s a nomination worth getting, but nobody’s really satisfied with who is in the field,” said Matthew Dowd, who was a top campaign strategist for George W. Bush. “There are these real fissures in the party now, and nobody is capable of unifying them.”

The old cliché has it that when it comes to picking their candidates, Democrats fall in love while Republicans fall in line. But this year it would seem that Republican voters are doing neither.

The GOP rank and file have a palpable lack of enthusiasm for Romney, who thus far has lost more states, five, than he has won, four.

Meanwhile, turnout has begun to fall off as the tone of the race gets uglier.

Public animosity

The GOP’s image is also taking a beating. In the latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, respondents expressing strongly negative feelings about the GOP outnumbered 3 to 1 those with strongly positive feelings. They aren’t thrilled with the Democrats, either, but the intense animosity is not running nearly as high.

Party leaders say that turmoil and division within the Republican ranks is nothing new.

In a speech last week at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, celebrating what would have been the former president’s 101st birthday, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour noted that as far back as 1912, Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected because he “got to run against two Republican presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, so great was the rift within our party.”

Political purity

What’s troublesome now, Barbour said, is that “some voters are seeking purity in their choice. In politics, purity is a dead-dog loser. You need unity, and purity is the enemy of unity.”

The relationship within the GOP family is not an easy one, given that tea party members blame the Republican establishment, along with the Democrats, for much of what they see as wrong with Washington: excessive spending, special deals such as earmarks, bailouts such as the rescue of Wall Street.

Another force at work within the party this year: Ron Paul and his hordes of devoted followers.

Not since Reagan in 1976 has the voice of an also-ran been so influential, some Republicans argue, because the party needs the energy that his supporters can bring. Romney in particular has been noticeably solicitous of Paul’s goodwill.