The best strategy now, I feel, is to break away from the GOP to form an authentic conservative party, with the expectation that 2016 might be the last hurrah for the GOP in a vote splitter, then pick up the pieces and let the political spectrum re-align around leftist Democrats and authentic conservatives without this wishy-washy centrist third rail which has been mostly a short circuit in modern times. Bush (W) won more as a conservative than a centrist, and the elder Bush’s win as mentioned above was in expectation of a continued conservative administration that generally fizzled out. Otherwise, the record of centrist Republicans since 1976 has been poor with the electorate either staying home, splitting off or remaining unenthused to the point where any Democrat could win, even deeply flawed ones.
I think it’s time to abandon the GOP and back a new American Conservative Party. There may be something out there with the name and skeleton already. The platform should be libertarian enough to attract that wedge of support, then build from that base — small, efficient government, a strong military, cutting back the power of the state and the entitlement culture, intelligent economic policy, caution on climate and homosexual agendas that threaten to undermine America ... all the sorts of things that the RINO crowd will not touch and cannot understand.
It would be worth one term of Hillary Clinton to kill of the GOP, after all, there is no RINO much different from Hillary Clinton anyway.
... and if they/we can’t muster up a new party (which has to start on the local level), and insist we must ‘fix’ the GOP, we will need push hard to line up deep red state primaries early, and force them to be CLOSED primaries, else you’ll get another GOP light weight that’ll just roll-em over and fetch the slimy ball whenever Hillary throws it.
Again, that’s:
a) Closed primaries
b) More Conservative States early.
c) Take control of the primary debates - with our OWN moderators.
If we cannot do all of these things between 2014 and 2016, then we’re better off splintering into our own new constitution based political party. Anything else has proven to be a losing proposition.
Just my $0.02.