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Conservative MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on Sunday warned Republicans that fringe elements were causing the party to shrink and it was "just gerrymandering" that allowed the GOP to keep control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2012 elections.

A Republican State Leadership Committee report released earlier this month acknowledged that a "Strategy of Targeting State Legislative Races in 2010 Led to a Republican U.S. House Majority in 2013."

On Sunday, Scarborough pointed to this as evidence that the Republican Party needed to become more inclusive.

"William F. Buckley in the 1960s at some point had to start defining the boundaries of conservatism," Scarborough explained to NBC's David Gregory. "He went after the John Birch Society, Ayn Rand, George Wallace. That has to happen again with this party because it’s getting smaller and smaller."

"In this debate, we actually have conservative thinkers, talking about Ronald Reagan being a RINO -- a Republican in name only -- because he supported an assault weapons ban. They keep pushing themselves closer and closer to the cliff."

"But I just have to say one other really important point, because I made a mistake over the past month talking about how Republicans have also won a majority in the House," he continued. "We actually got a minority of votes nationwide in House races."

"It was just gerrymandering from 2010 that gave us the majority."

A post-election analysis by Think Progress' Ian Millhiser determined that House Democrats actually received almost 1.4 million more votes than House Republicans in 2012, but thanks to partisan gerrymandering, Democrats would have needed to win by 7.25 percentage points to take back control of Congress.

(h/t: Think Progress)

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Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham on Sunday pointed to the roots of Southern strategy of the late 1960s -- which appealed to racism in the South -- as an example of how the Republican Party should reform itself after President Barack Obama won re-election.

"If the reaction to the election is let's dig into our core principles and try to remake them, I think the GOP will lose even more seats in 2014," Ingraham told Fox News host Chris Wallace. "If it becomes a bidding war with Republicans in either this group or that group -- whether it's Latinos or women -- we're going to give you more stuff or we're going to do amnesty plus... it's not going to work."

"The Republicans have to take a lesson from -- and I hate to bring up Reagan again -- when Goldwater got shellacked in '64, Bill Buckley and Brent Bozell Sr. and all these conservatives got together and they said, we're going to figure out how to sell this idea of economic conservatism and the conservative framework to new voters. And they went into the South and they transformed Mississippi and Alabama, all these places where people had never voted Republican before."

In his book "From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism," author Joseph Lowndes points out that William F. Buckley used the National Review to argue that southern whites were superior to blacks and Brent Bozell wrote that the federal government had no right to end segregation.

The National Review later moved away from overt racism and supported Barry Goldwater, whose presidential run became the template for the "Southern strategy" to appeal to white voters in the South.

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Rachel Maddow with a really great follow up to her interview with Rand Paul last night and why his Libertarian views and what they mean to how he would govern if elected, matters. As she noted, those very same arguments were used to justify opposition to the Civil Rights movement and even if the intellectuals of the day like William F. Buckley weren't actually the ones with the clubs, and the firearms and the hoses aimed at the protesters, their ideas were used to defend that violence.

Rachel quoted Ezra Klein on this over at The Maddow Blog.

Why Rand Paul's muddle matters:

From perpetual smarty Ezra Klein:

What's gotten Paul in trouble, however, is that he's so skeptical of government power that he's not even comfortable with the public sector telling private businesses that they can't discriminate based on race. That, I fear, does have public policy implications.

For instance: Can the federal government set the private sector's minimum wage? Can it tell private businesses not to hire illegal immigrants? Can it tell oil companies what safety systems to build into an offshore drilling platform? Can it tell toy companies to test for lead? Can it tell liquor stores not to sell to minors? These are the sort of questions that Paul needs to be asked now, because the issue is not "area politician believes kooky but harmless thing." It's "area politician espouses extremist philosophy on issue he will be voting on constantly."