Rule #1 for the GOP should be the following: Don't ever nominate a presidential candidate whose odds of carrying his own state are small. This is where the GOP got into a ton of trouble, folks. If Romney had been governor of Texas, Ohio or Florida, he would have won this election in a landslide -- because he wouldn't have appeared so transparently unprincipled on a key campaign issue like Obamacare and a key "values voter" issue like gay marriage.
I knew there was trouble when Romney couldn’t pull out a clear primary win in Michigan. In 08 he flogged John McCain here by nearly 10 points. In 2010 it came down to an electoral tie with Santorum winning 58 of our 83 counties and the congressional districts split evenly. That ended with a late night rule change that gave Romney one more delegate.
Romney used a liberal campaign strategy to pick up wins by winning urban areas that weren’t going to vote for him in the general election. Once he won the nomination he had to rely on the people he had passed over during the primary.
It was bad news and a lot of FReepers knew it but once Romney became the nominee, speaking that truth became blaspheme. The moral of that story is that shouting people down or diving them away doesn’t make a winner, it makes a surprised loser.