And yet the GOP has never learned this lesson. Every election cycle they claim to support the social issues that social conservatives think are important and after they are elected nothing changes.
The GOP has controlled both houses of Congress for most of the last two decades and the White House for much of this time.
Their ONLY notable accomplishment was the Partial Birth Abortion ban and that didn't actually save a single life, it simply banned ONE TYPE of abortion (the murderers now inject the baby with poison while still in utero before inducing labor and it is totally legal).
Let's look at the presidential elections that the GOP has won since Reagan:
1988: Dukakis was an moron and Bush still had to lie to conservatives to win.
2000: Gore ran a HORRIBLE campaign and still almost won.
2004: Kerry was the most out-of-touch person to run for president in modern times and people weren't yet aware how incompetent Bush's war policy was.
The GOP CANNOT win without the conservative vote.
As I have said before, we have no clue what sort of skeleton the media has on Trump, but only the most naive would believe that there isn't an "October Surprise" in the works.