Before Republicans went looking for answers Tuesday night, some of them went looking for the remote.

When it became clear about midnight that President Barack Obama was safely on the way to re-election, a handful of cranky and inebriated Republican donors wandered about Romney's election night headquarters, angrily demanding that the giant television screens inside the ballroom be switched from CNN to Fox News, where Republican strategist Karl Rove was making frantic, face-saving pronouncements about how Ohio was not yet lost.

Rove was wrong, of course.

But the signs of desperation inside the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center on Tuesday night were symptomatic of a Republican Party now standing at a crossroads, with not much track in sight.

How did Romney lose a race that seemed so tantalizingly within reach just one week ago?

"We were this close," one of Romney's most senior advisers sighed after watching the Republican nominee concede. "This close."

Little support from young, minorities

Some answers are easy.

Romney lost embarrassingly among young people, African-Americans and Hispanics, a brutal reminder for Republicans that their party is ideologically out of tune with fast-growing segments of the population.

Obama crushed Romney among Hispanic voters by a whopping 44 points, a margin of victory that likely propelled the president to victories in Nevada, Colorado and possibly Florida.

The stunning defeat alarmed Republicans who fear extinction unless the party can figure out how to temper the kind of hardline immigration rhetoric that Romney delivered during his Republican primary bid.

"Latinos were disillusioned with Barack Obama, but they are absolutely terrified by the idea of Mitt Romney," said GOP fundraiser Ana Navarro, a confidante to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio.

Sandy upsets campaign 'momentum'

Beyond the ugly math staring them in the face, Romney's top aides and the Republican heavyweights who populated the somber ballroom Tuesday evening offered an array of explanations for their loss.

With some of them double-fisting beers and others sipping bourbon, members of Romney's team blamed several factors that were, in some ways, beyond their control.

Many campaign aides pointed the finger at Sandy, the punishing superstorm and October surprise that razed the East Coast and consumed news coverage for what was supposed to be the final full week of campaigning.

It upset the dynamic of a campaign that had been reset during the first debate in Denver, where Obama delivered a wilting-flower act in full view of the American populace that allowed Romney to seize control of the race and set the terms for the final fall sprint.

The storm, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told CNN on Sunday, "broke Romney's momentum."

After being criticized in the media for focusing on "small things" like Big Bird and "Romnesia," Sandy offered Obama a chance to once again look presidential.

There also are very real hard feelings inside the Romney camp about the way New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, seemed to lavish praise on Obama in the wake of Sandy's destruction, allowing Obama to appear bipartisan just as Romney was attacking him for being petty and partisan.

"He didn't have to bear hug the guy," complained one Romney insider.

"It won't be forgotten easily," grumbled another about Christie.

Social conservatives blame squishy positions

As Romney aides began the soul-searching that usually follows a loss, Republicans outside the campaign began pointing fingers at the team.

Some social conservatives were quick to rip open barely healed wounds, claiming that Romney's squishy positions on abortion and same-sex marriage -- closely scrutinized during both of his Republican primary campaigns -- left grass-roots Republicans uninspired.

"What was presented as discipline by the Romney campaign by staying on one message, the economy, was a strategic error that resulted in a winning margin of pro-life votes being left on the table," said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List.

Some wondered aloud about the selection of Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as Romney's running mate, suggesting that a Republican from a more winnable battleground state might have made a difference.

"Rob Portman would've been worth 1% in Ohio," said former Ohio GOP Chairman Kevin DeWine. "Marco Rubio would've been worth a point in Florida. Bob McDonnell would've been worth a point in Virginia."

The Romney team and his super PAC allies, some Republicans are already saying, ran a banal series of television ads and allowed their candidate to be defined early on by Obama as an outsourcing plutocrat who wanted to let Detroit go bankrupt.

Their pushback seemed feeble for most of the summer and early autumn. And crucially, Romney never seemed to articulate a clear rationale for the presidency.

The campaign's decision to air a misleading ad in Toledo media market about Chrysler moving Jeep production to China during the closing days of the race is also emerging as a prime reason for Romney's loss in the state he needed to win most.

One senior Ohio Republican called the Jeep ad a "desperate" move and said the Romney campaign walked into a "hornet's nest" of negative press coverage.

Nick Everhart, a Columbus-based ad maker, blamed the Ohio loss, in part, on the Romney campaign's "poor media buying."

But an adviser to one prominent Republican governor who campaigned for Romney said the campaign's problems were more fundamental.

"Obama ran a very smart but very small campaign, which he could afford to do because he was running against a very small opponent," this Republican said. "The fundamentals of the election were the same all along, and they were this: When there's an incumbent no one wants to vote for, and a challenger that no one wants to vote for, people will vote for the incumbent. At no point did Romney give people any reason to vote for him, and so they didn't."

Democrats' strong ground game

Romney may never have been the GOP's dream candidate, but even if he were, Republicans would still have been forced to confront another troubling structural problem on Election Day.

Democrats showed decisively that their ground game -- the combined effort to find, persuade and turn out voters -- is devastatingly better than anything their rivals have to offer.

In 2004, Republicans tapped the science of microtargeting to redefine campaigns. That is now ancient history.

"When it comes to the use of voter data and analytics, the two sides appear to be as unmatched as they have ever been on a specific electioneering tactic in the modern campaign era," Sasha Issenberg, a journalist and an expert in the science of campaigning, wrote just days before the election proved him right. "No party ever has ever had such a durable structural advantage over the other on polling, making television ads, or fundraising, for example."