One reason I would say that Republicans are in the place they are is that they've gotten themselves invested in winning elections by means other than being persuasive and popular. They gerrymander districts, they vote cage, they talk about doing things like Operation Chaos, they drown people in negative commercials, obstruct the legislative agenda of their opponents, pull power-plays...
...everything but make sure that people are on board with them, willing to give them their support. When it comes down to it, changing people's minds is the most difficult means of winning an election to make work. It requires you to act with respect, to make compromises, to take pristine perfect purity and make it into real world shifts in loyalty.
The idea is that if we play as many dirty tricks as the Republicans, we'll somehow counter their advantage. Me? I think if we really want to prolong the whole Republican debacle, our best bet is to be honest.
Operation Chaos, let's be frank, was a bit of a letdown. Not enough Republicans cared to change their registration, and there were really many more Democrats around to make sure things went right.
I don't think we'll have the numbers to make much of a difference. Our Republican neighbors, though, might have a better crack at it.
To put it simply for Romney and the rest of the Republicans, the real problem is that to beat Obama, the eventual candidate must be able to wrest the center from him. if they fail, if independents don't show up for the Republican, the GOP's screwed. That said, they are a party who have come to believe some rather compelling things, as far as they are concerned. They have come to believe that the problems of the past stem from the insufficient conservatism of their leaders, and that the current ascension of the Democrats to power represents an incredible disaster for the country that must be reversed at all costs.
The simple truth about Romney is that he is a Republican of gentler times for the GOP, when the base was more content to dispense with the red meat to play to the center- the age of "compassionate conservatism", where Republicans engaged in their own brand of Clintonian triangulation, albeit dressed up with lots of conservative-friendly talk.
It was a recognition of a reality. They ran two standard Republicans in a row and lost. So they ran Bush. They ran moderates in Minnesota and in Massachussets and won. Then came 2006 and 2008, and the collossal failures there. The Republicans, desperate not to have to rethink their whole system, basically declared the experiment of "compassionate conservatism" a failure, and pledged to go even further to the right.
Thus, the Tea Party. But the Tea Party itself represents an incredible act of solipsism on the part of the GOP, an attempt to ignore, push beyond the issues that made them a minority party in Congress for the previous four years, and lost them the White House in 2008, to a black guy with a funny name who wasn't ashamed to sound like a liberal.
By willpower alone, they were able to summon up a great big movement, while we were in our typical midterm-lull.
The trouble for Republicans is that the changeover had less to do with a reaction against liberalism, and more just frustration with things as they were. A frustration Republicans share, but have a rather ideosyncratic theory about. Because of this, Republicans have done a good job of alienating people by attempting to use their newfound power to rollback liberalism on every front, even where that rollback is unwanted, or where the means are inherently dangerous, like the Debt Ceiling debacle showed us.
Republicans are not in a good place, psychologically speaking. The insularity of the party is wearing on their judgment.
The truth about the Republicans is that much of the damage that is being done to their election prospects is being done to themselves, by themselves.
This is where honest comes in. Santorum is honestly more hardline of a conservative than Santorum is, and that's something people need to hear more and more about in the key states. The truth is, the Romney of just a few years ago was pro-choice. He instituted the insurance mandate in his state, which got turned into what they call Obamacare now. Santorum has shown on multiple occasions that he's extremely anti-choice. If you want to play a dirty trick, how about funding SuperPAC commercials that make these facts clear in a conservative friendly way?
Or, we can death-hug Romney, making nice, glowing, slightly tongue-in-cheek commercials about the old Romney, and how we'd like to see him back for various reasons.
Point is, if we do this right, the real Republicans do more damage to themselves, and we can take advantage of that.