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It’s long been suspected that the once-disciplined Republican Party harbored a potential for becoming the Keystone Cops of electoral politics.

It began before the 2014 GOP congressional take-over, with the fights over the debt ceiling and shutting down the federal government, for which they could have paid a much heavier price than they did, thanks for the short attention span of today’s American voter.

But while Republicans dodged a couple of bullets in the past, the upcoming presidential race may see things really come-a-cropper. Why is this possible?

Already the GOP leadership in the House and Senate cannot agree on the Patriot Act and unless they do come to some agreement, it spells trouble for the security hawks in the party as well as demonstrating their ability to govern.

But having relied on their “Southern Strategy” and appeals to social conservatives for so long seems finally to have come back to bite them. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, among the more prominent Republican While House candidates both, are taking positions not designed to appeal to non-aligned voters that the GOP needs – Cruz on matters like gay marriage, Paul on opposition to sending American troupes to fight abroad – and they don’t look like they’re about to change, either. And Marco Rubio has taken so many positions on so many issues it’s hard to predict where he will come down.

That’s not the true crux of the matter, however. The looming problem for the Republican National Committee is that there are to date somewhere between a dozen and a dozen and a half candidates who, because the Supreme Court ruled in the Republican’s favor on “Citizens United,” (be careful what you wish for), every Tom, Dick, and Harriet can have his or her own “unaligned” Super PAC.

That means even business outsiders like Donald Trump (a super PAC in and of himself) or previously failed business hopefuls like Carly Fiorino or very conservative Evangelists like Mike Huckabee or Rick Perry, who couldn’t remember his lines last time around and once said Texas might have to secede, and their fellow “long-shots” can stay on life-support funding long after the writing on the wall should have told them they were toast. That simply upsets the math, folks.

What the Republican pros really don’t want is a long drawn out primary in which every candidate has the opportunity to shoot him/herself in the foot three times over and there is no clear favorite who can bring out both the right-wing GOP base and still bring along with the great undecided middle-of the-road voter.

Worse yet, now that we have pick-&-choose primaries (arch-conservatives do well in South Carolina but not so well in New Hampshire, so why bother?) it may be hard to tell who won and who lost on a country-wide basis.

This could lead to a brokered convention. While that would make for exciting television, it could easily cripple the eventual Republican nominee.