“Uncivil war,” they’re calling it.

Family issues, more like.

The political mayhem surrounding New York’s 23rd House District special election has reached a crescendo, here on this final day of the campaign. November 3, 2009, is the day of reckoning for a grassroots conservative base eager to flex its muscle and make a statement about the future of the Republican Party going forth to the nationwide 2010 elections and beyond.

Commentators and observers of all stripes and sides have weighed in on the race, which proves to be a harbinger of things soon to come. Where they differ on is what exactly is soon to come. Is it the impending decline and relegation of the GOP to a permanent minority? Or is it, as those in the “tea party” movement see it, the beginning of a precipitous ideological takeback in the Republican Party of Reagan-ite/1994 proportions?

What’s most striking is the giddiness and dead-set certainty of both Democrats and Republicans conservatives in the rightness of their vantage points on the issue. Perhaps, as most conservatives would love to proclaim, “Dede Scozzafava is merely the first casualty of this war.” Perhaps NY-23 is just the beginning of “a nightmare scenario for Republican Party officials.” But therein lies the inherent problem with such lines of reasoning.

Democrats falsely assume that the strength of the Republican Party lies in the successes and failures of its “officials.” Sadly, NY-23 has shown that the NRCC, RNC, and MSM have joined the left in underestimating the raw power of the conservative (notice, not Republican) electorate. As if they needed reminding: the “Republican right” isn’t really Republican at all, at least not as much as it is ideologically conservative. As hard as it is for the D.C.-West Coast axis to believe, it appears that there may yet remain an American political party that is not subject to the whims of its talking head elites and special interest groups but that is truly of, by, and for the people who comprise it.

It’s quite a stretch to say that Hoffman-Scozzafava signals a movement to “purge” moderates from the party. Scozzafava was no moderate. Charlie Crist is a moderate. A moderate Republican who believes in card check and free-willy government spending is no moderate and certainly is no Republican. So this notion that conservatives are to blame for the death of “Big Tent” Republicanism is patently absurd.

If anything, it’s Scozzafava that has done the most damage to moderates in the Republican party by endorsing the Democratic candidate. Her bewildering move only proves her detractors right and only further cements the seeds of distrust in conservatives nationwide about other Republican moderates, of whom she claimed to be a part.

The AP is already pre-spinning a potential Election Day sweep by the Republicans as a moot point. No surprise there, but just as moot is the idea that NY-23 represents the beginning of the end for a bruised and battered Republican Party.