In my mind the Republican Party is already dead. They’ve had more than enough chances. I won’t give a dime or a vote to their candidates again.
As an actual opposition party, yes. It's been that way (dead, I mean) for a couple of election cycles. Indeed, it was dead during all eight years of the Bush presidency.
So, what are conservatives gonna do?
Seems to me that political conservatism isn't so much dead as it's infantile. It's never coalesced into a political institution with sufficient discipline and coherence to make a case to the voters.
Here's the only hope for political conservatism that I can see now:
The scenario above doesn't have to be so dramatic and severe as I've sketched it to give conservatives some traction. Most importantly, such a scenario might forge a coherence among conservatives that allows them to be politically effective where heretofore they have never been able to pull that off.
If this doesn't work out that way, who knows what the next several generations are going to experience. I don't think anyone can forecast that.