Wolfentoad is right. After Goldwater was nominated, many Rockefeller Republicans jumped ship. Did that halt the GOP's march to the right?
After 1992, many pro-choice moderate Republicans jumped ship. Did that halt the GOP's march towards becoming a pro-life Party?
After 2008, many college educated people jumped ship. Did that make the GOP any less anti-intellectual?
Can you see the pattern?
PiT is right, the more people in your given demographic leave, the less dependent on you it will be and the more hostile on you it will be when it inevitably wins without you. The worst mistake those liberal Republicans ever made, was too leave.
And Virginia is right, the left should be very afraid. An exodus of neocons and college educated Republicans towards the Democrats, will in fact serve to pull the Democratic party more in a pro-market/pro-neoliberal direction and push the Republicans in more of a nationalist-populist direction.
Basically a similar alignment to the 1880's minus the post Civil War racial and geographical paradigm.
As of now Democrats seem to be getting more
liberal (damn, I'm doing it myself now) left-wing on economic issues, and this is primarily driven by college-educated Democrats being very left-wing on those issues (though they're different from the college-educated Republicans you mentioned). I don't think these Dems will let some neocons spoil their party. Numerous potential Democratic presidential candidates already support single-payer. I wouldn't be surprised if the next Democratic president tries to implement a very populist agenda and angers his/her new Republican supporters (meanwhile the Republicans couldn't possibly nominate someone as toxic as Trump, but we've heard things like that before lol).
The Reagan Revolution probably is coming to an end, though I don't think the change will be as dramatic as some people predict. I think the GOP will become more populist/moderate on economic issues, but the Dems will veer even sharper to the left. Bernie Sanders influenced a lot of young Democrats. And when the choice is between say Ramesh Ponnuru (or someone else who proposes raising the child tax credit and EITC instead of slashing the top income tax rate) and Bernie Sanders I'm pretty sure that I know who those suburban college-educated Republican will vote for.
