The GOP can not win the majority votes of any minorities groups, unions, gays, teachers, or hispanics. The women were the only group that the GOP lost that they could have won. They lost the women's vote because the majority of women cannot agree to bear the child of their rapist. The religious extremists cannot give up this anti-choice abortion posture and the GOP will lose the women again.
Having just lost an election, many Republicans are anxious to remake our party in the image of Democrats. The theory seems to be that whatever we're doing isn't working, so we better change everything.
But in fact, whatever Republicans did in 2012 -- other than an overly long primary fight -- worked amazingly well, given the circumstances.
In a detailed analysis of the 2012 election, William A. Galston, a fellow with the liberal Brookings Institution, makes a number of fascinating observations that Republicans would do well to consider before embracing amnesty, abortion, gay marriage and Beyonce.
In my...
The GOP doesn't need your kind of advice: giving up our principles, abandoning babies to the killer's knife, etc.
Inviting social moderates into the tent so we can prevent the country's slide into socialism does NOT mean the Republicans are going to suddenly become militant baby killers, and it does NOT mean that anyone has to abandon his/her principles.
It means that we recognize that a coalition of social conservatives and social moderates, all of whom are ardent fiscal conservatives, will band together to send BO & Pals back to their various universities and Wall Street firms where they cannot wreck the country quite so quickly.
The social issues, which Constitutionally are none of the federal government's beeswax, will be sent to the states where conservatives have better control of the politics.
The GOP won married women overwhelming, women retirees overwhelming, the votes of white voters in every age group demographic. Obama won, solely based on the way the electoral college is structured and by state voting systems that give all electoral votes based on winner take all.
How do you pick up the fringes of those groups? By emphasizing the perils of Big Government, particularly as far as economics is concerned. Don't act like you want a president who will spend all of his/her time fighting social issues that are (a) not the responsibility of government, and (b) insoluble.