WASHINGTON: My election night was spent among the grieving. Most didn’t know they were going to a wake when they headed to the grand ballroom of the Boston Convention Centre on Tuesday night. On the contrary, they were dressed for a victory party. Before the first results trickled in, some even managed to smile. But within an hour or two, once the electoral map had turned Democratic blue where it was meant to go Republican red, the atmosphere turned funereal. A band struck up a tune or two, but no one felt like dancing.

What began that night for the Republican party is a process familiar to all who have observed an electoral defeat. Think of it as the political equivalent of the five stages of grief. The ones that trigger the deepest anguish are the serial defeats and the beatings you didn't expect. That's why 1992 was a double trauma for Labour: the Tories had defeated them four times in a row and they had done it on a night Labour felt destined to win.

Whether personal or political, the first stage is denial. That emotion will forever be embodied by the electrifying sight of former Bush guru turned Fox pundit Karl Rove scolding Fox's own number-crunchers for calling the election for Barack Obama, desperately pretending two plus two did not, in fact, equal four. In 1983 senior British labour party minister Tony Benn famously refused to see Labour's pummelling as a disaster, celebrating instead that 8 million people had voted for socialism.

Next comes anger, often manifested in lashing out and blaming others. There was plenty of that in the ballroom in Boston, turned initially against what both the right and hostile left call “the mainstream media”. When Candy Crowley — the CNN anchor who had moderated the second TV debate, arbitrating at one crucial point in Obama's favour — appeared on the giant TV screens, the Republicans in their suits and evening dresses began booing loudly. “It's your fault!” they howled, echoing the Labour faithful in 1992 who blamed Rupert Murdoch for their woes, taking as truth the claim that it was “the Sun (Pro Conservative party British tabloid) wot won it”.

Since then, Republican fingers have pointed in a dozen other directions. At Obama for practising what Charles Krauthammer calls “the darker arts of public persuasion” (a phrase that suggests the president hypnotised the US electorate into voting for him, perhaps via a secret, Kenyan strain of black magic); at the Mitt Romney campaign team, for promising a wave of “organic enthusiasm” among voters that failed to materialise; and at the candidate himself, for being too stiff, too north-eastern, too moderate under that fake conservative veneer.

This is the familiar lament of just-defeated parties: that they did not suffer because they were too extreme, but because they were not extreme enough. See those British Conservatives who demanded a return to uncompromising core principle after the defeats of 1997, 2001 and 2005. It's tempting and comforting, but almost always wrong.

The third stage of grief is said to be bargaining, accepting that something has to change but seeking to delay or dilute what needs to be done. In politics, it's the half-hearted attempt at reform, often preceded by a party embarking on a “listening tour” of the country that has rejected them. But it rarely goes the whole way. Former Conservative party leader William Hague's “fresh start” still ended with him campaigning in a Keep the Pound truck.

In the current Republican case, you can hear it in the time-honoured admission that “we didn't get our message across” or “there is a perception problem”. The party agrees to tweak appearances, but remains unwilling to undertake deep reform.

After depression — common after a string of losses, such as the five defeats in the popular vote the Republicans have suffered in the last six presidential elections — comes acceptance. In politics, that usually means a recognition that the country you seek to lead has changed and that, therefore, you have to change with it, no matter how painful that process will be.

By arrangement with the Guardian