After two accidental victories, the Republican Party must now prepare for a spell in the wilderness. Goldwater's 1964 defeat was only four years away from Nixon's victory in 1968, so it is not impossible that Republicans will come back sooner rather than later.

But Tuesday night's results are far from encouraging.

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Apart from once solidly Republican Virginia, we have good reason to believe that Obama won North Carolina and Florida, two fast-growing states that reflect the economic and cultural dynamism of the New South. Florida seemed like a particularly tough state for Obama to win, given its singular mix of anti-Castro Cuban Americans, hawkish pro-Israel Democrats, Panhandle conservatives, and tax-hating homeowners.

The evaporation of housing wealth, and a highly effective and reassuring Obama campaign, seems to have changed all that. "Jesusland," the sovereign Red America envisioned by Internet wags after the last presidential election, is a shadow of its former self. Even Indiana, that sturdy Republican redoubt, fell before the massive wave of Obamathusiasm.

By now you've heard plenty of Obama skeptics fret about the "cult" surrounding this unusually skilled politician, but of course there is an obvious upside to Obama's extraordinary charisma. It has become a commonplace to note that an Obama presidency will likely have a profoundly positive effect on black Americans, particularly younger ones from disadvantaged backgrounds. Because of America's history of enslavement and forced segregation, black Americans have traditionally proved skeptical about the fairness of mainstream American institutions.

And why shouldn't they be? As the left-wing historian Ira Katznelson argued in his brilliant When Affirmative Action Was White, New Deal programs designed to benefit struggling families and returning GIs disproportionately benefited whites over blacks due to racially biased implementation in the states of the Old Confederacy.

The persistent wealth gap between black and white Americans can be attributed in part to the uneven distribution of the housing wealth created by subsidized mortgages in the 1940s and 1950s. We've started the long process of undoing this injustice, but it will likely take decades more. Ending official racism hasn't been nearly enough. The most important thing we can do is to help families stay together in our most vulnerable communities. But we also need to build mutual trust across our ethnic divides, and the election of a black president will, one hopes, help matters along.

Obama's victory should also serve as a reminder to Republicans that they badly need to gain the trust of black voters, as well as the Asian American and Latino voters who constitute an ever-larger share of the electorate. The McCain-Palin campaign will be remembered as the last one that focused almost exclusively on motivating the "real America" of homogenous small towns and suburbs to vote GOP.

If the Republican Party is going to succeed, it needs to win back the populous, multiracial suburbs of New York and California, not to mention Virginia and Florida and North Carolina. Getting there won't take sophisticated ethnic outreach--rather, it will take a relentless focus on the pocketbook issues that unite middle and working class voters regardless of race or region.

Reihan Salam is an associate editor at The Atlantic and a fellow at the New America Foundation. The co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream , he writes a weekly column for Forbes.com.