When it comes to damage control, rule No. 1 is paramount: When in a hole, quit digging.

Somehow, this is time-tested best practice that vast elements of today’s Republican Party have forsaken. Either the dog ate the memo or it got lost in the mail.

The Republican Party comes off three consecutive elections with results ranging from disappointing to disastrous. 2018 was a blue wave repudiation of President Donald Trump in which Democrats gained 41 seats in the U.S. House. 2020 saw the first incumbent president to lose reelection in nearly three decades with a less-than-inspirational Joe Biden dislodging Trump by 7 million votes. That is fact; not some kind of alternate reality a not-insignificant fragment of Republicans continue to inhabit.

That brings us to 2022 and an off-year election with Democrats led by a president with underwater approval numbers. The entire framework of priority issues, centering on inflation and crime, seemed to favor Republicans. All factors pointed to a big GOP year with the major uncertainty being whether it would be a huge win or just a decent one.

And, yet. After all the shouting and when the votes were counted, Democrats essentially achieved a draw. True, Republicans gained the thinnest of majorities in Congress. But given expectations, if that qualifies as victory, then you must enjoy your morning coffee served lukewarm.

Across the Capitol in the Senate, Democrats actually added a seat to their majority despite a difficult election map.

And best not to forget that the Republican nominee has prevailed in the popular vote in but a single presidential race during those three preceding decades.

Given this slide, especially that since 2018, a rational person would think that Republicans would put a premium on escaping the hole, not digging it ever deeper.

Though based on abundant evidence, that rational person would be wrong. If recent months are any indicator, and they are, Republicans seem intent on replacing the elephant with a shovel as their symbol.

Look around. In battleground Michigan, Republicans just elected as their new state party chair Kristina Karamo, an election denier as wacky as they come, fresh off her own 14-point defeat in a race for secretary of state that she, of course, refused to concede.

Similar Republican state chairs have taken the party reins in Florida, Kansas and Arizona. In that latter state, once honorably served by the likes of Barry Goldwater and John McCain, the winning candidate for chair was actually the more moderate of the contenders. Jeff DeWit refuses to answer questions about the validity of the 2020 election where his opponent was an outright denier.

Such is moderation for activist Republican types these days.

Speaking of Arizona, losing gubernatorial pixie Kari Lake has left center stage minus any acceptance of defeat to become a side show for adoring audiences in Iowa and elsewhere.

Just weeks into this Congress, the evidence is everywhere that the loudest, fringiest Republican voices hold sway. Those of serious intent wanting to govern are an afterthought. To become speaker of the U.S. House, Kevin McCarthy auctioned off the remaining pieces of his soul to hostage-takers far more interested in spectacle and Twitter clicks than any nuances of policy.

When the camera is on the likes of Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, and when they wield the balance of power, middle ground, otherwise gettable voters turn away. When Marjorie Taylor Greene, resplendent in white fur, heckles the president from the State of the Union’s cheap seats, Biden advisers in the White House high-five while Republicans with brainwave activity avert their eyes.

All the while, here at home, the likes of Tina Peters, Dave Williams and Kevin Lundberg are battling it out to lead the Colorado Republican Party. In their world, the formula for a GOP resurgence lies not in acknowledging election results and pulling back from the sensational but in more of all of it.

Maybe Peters can qualify for a supervised prison work release program for central committee meetings.

For these true-believers, subtraction trumps addition. Instead of broadening the party’s appeal, the emphasis is on narrowing who can participate. Since state law now gives unaffiliated voters, the dominant chunk of Colorado, easy access to party primaries, the die-hards propose to eliminate primaries.

Hole, meet shovel.

Current GOP Chair Kristi Burton Brown is as true-red a full-spectrum conservative as you will find. She checks all the boxes of pro-life, low taxes and limited government. Yet, for this crowd, she is insufficiently reactionary and even a sell-out.

Hear this: When someone suggests that Burton Brown is part of the problem due to lack of conservative conviction, you know you are dealing with people who have left behind the real world and any plausible goal of political rehabilitation, much less triumph.

My old hometown of Colorado Springs offers a microcosm of these depths. The paleo-rightists who control the El Paso County GOP mechanisms just reelected Chair Vickie Tonkins and her slate of loyalists whose agenda is far more about Trumpian delusion and division than about making the party more attractive to wavering masses.

El Paso County’s days as an incontrovertible GOP stronghold are over. Republicans remain dominant, but their advantage is slacking. When Cory Gardner defeated a Democratic incumbent to win a U.S. Senate seat in 2014, his margin in El Paso County was over 68,000 votes. Eight years later, Joe O’Dea’s margin over Michael Bennet was less than 26,000. The trend line in Douglas County is similar.

Just perhaps, that should occupy the minds of Republican Party leaders more than purity tests, election revisionism and no end of exaggerated resentments.

One smart Republican recently assessed that the most attractive Republican candidate in Colorado running in a deeply red year against the lamest Democrat would still lose by at least five points.

Another Republican operative put it more succinctly. “The GOP brand in Colorado is just below that of gonorrhea.”

Anyone wanting to step forward with a strategy more enlightened than dredging the bottom?