WASHINGTON — With Republicans bracing for big losses today, a fight is simmering among the party’s ideological factions over the question of who lost the Congress.

The fight will move to the fore if the Republicans lose either the House or the Senate. It will center on whether the defeat should be blamed on those associated with the Iraq war or on those involved in the corruption scandals that led to the indictment and subsequent retirement from Congress of the majority leader, Thomas DeLay, and tainted others in the Republican tent.

On one side of the divide are the neoconservatives, policy intellectuals who migrated to the Republican Party in the 1970s and who, since 1997, advocated toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime. On the other side is the party’s base of anti-tax activists, gun owners, and social conservatives, many of whom are souring on the Iraq war.

“The people who want to be supportive of the president’s position on Iraq do themselves a disservice by trying to attack other parts of the Republican coalition and blame them for any electoral troubles on Tuesday,” the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, said yesterday of the Iraq war’s early supporters. “The political party and a political movement is a team. You either work together or you don’t. And you can’t ask other people to be supportive of you if you are not supportive of them.”

Mr. Norquist was referring in part to a story that Vanity Fair magazine posted on the Internet on November 3. In it, several of the intellectuals who supported the war in 2003 were quoted as saying President Bush fumbled its implementation by failing to recognize the bureaucracy’s disloyalty. Those interviewed in the piece responded over the weekend in National Review Online, saying their quotes were taken out of context and that the author of the piece, David Rose, promised that the story would not run until after the midterm elections.

The recriminations about the war do not end there. The choice of many neoconservatives to lead Iraq in lieu of the occupation, Ahmad Chalabi, was quoted Sunday by the New York Times magazine as blaming a former deputy secretary of defense and current president of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, for “chickening out” during the policy battles that followed the initial military campaign in 2003.

In this election cycle, many Republicans are already running against the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s foreign policy. The lone exception may be Senator Santorum of Pennsylvania, who most independent polls predict will lose his seat today.

In a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Norquist referred to the political occupation of Iraq as a “boat anchor on the president’s popularity.” Of a leading neoconservative who commented for the Vanity Fair article, Richard Perle, he said, “It doesn’t help that Perle was campaigning for a Democrat in a tight race,” referring to the former Defense Policy Board chairman’s support for an ex-naval reservist and pre-Iraq war intelligence analyst, Christopher Carney, in Pennsylvania’s 10th District.

The chairman of the American Conservative Union, David Keane, said he is predicting “a major debate” within the Republican Party after today’s elections, with a faction of Republicans favoring an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. “If you have destroyed the ability of your enemy to do damage to you and your friends, do you have an obligation to leave the place better than you found it at the cost of American lives?” Mr. Keane asked.

Mr. Keane said he likes Mr. Perle and has debated him about foreign policy at the Hudson Institute. But he said of the neoconservatives: “Their problem is they have never been wrong. First they lionized Bush and Rumsfeld, then they turned on Rumsfeld, and now on Bush. They don’t question their own assumptions on how to proceed, and blame everyone else. They may or may not be right, but after a while it gets tiresome.”

The founder of the American Spectator and a contributing editor of The New York Sun, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., said he did not think conservatives would favor withdrawing troops from Iraq. “I don’t think real conservatives, whether they be neo or Reaganites, are going to ditch this war, and they are not going to jump on each other because of the war,” he said.

Interviewed Sunday evening, Mr. Perle, who is still a registered Democrat, told the Sun, “I regret to say that there is no longer within the Democratic Party a sensible, centrist approach to defending the nation.”

He also said he didn’t think the current war would be a major source of division within the Republican Party. “If Al Gore was president, I think we would still be talking to the U.N. about what to do about Afghanistan and bin Laden,” he added.

Mr. Norquist said yesterday that a fight over who lost the Congress was not inevitable. “There is certainly no problem with guns, babies, or taxes. As problematic as Iraq is, that did not sink Republicans in ’04. You can explain the ’06 challenges differently,” he said. “Nine Republicans were retiring from marginal districts, and only two Democrats were retiring. Add to that the Foley scandal. This was going to be a rough year, period. The idea that people need to be fighting over it is not necessary.”