Argh, let's not use the media newsspeak colors, please. We don't call commies "blues", we call them "reds." Blue states are Republican, red are rodent. Sorry, it's one of my pet peeves, and I have to remind my fellow FReepers not to swallow the post-2000 kool-aid and aide in their psych warfare to disassociate the color red from the leftist Dems. Anywho, on with the show...
"I think Burns/Talent/Allen, regardless of circumstances, were a disastrous trio of losses for conservatives and show that right now we don’t have an effective message, or at least, that it isn’t getting through or being effectively communicated."
They were disastrous losses, but they weren't a solid indicator that a state was definitively going rodent. MT tossed Burns by a slim margin, but the GOP made legislative gains at the same time. Burns was the single most successful statewide Republican federal officeholder in the history of Montana. People don't realize that. We've had a string of major-league Republicans that came up short going back to the 1910s. But Burns was damaged goods and should never have run again. Republicans know they can't get away with even the slightest appearance of impropriety (while conversely the rodents don't make their bones until they have done something outright criminal).
As for the other two (and remember, we lost 6 in total, 4 Conservatives (incl. Santorum), 1 RINO (DeWine), and a pissant Socialist traitor (Chafee, now no longer a member of the GOP as of July)), Allen lost because of a dumb verbal gaffe and also a poorly run campaign in the fall, and Talent was the most unfortunate of the bunch. He initially wanted to be Governor, and because of the Carnahan death in '00 and other fraudulent rodent shenanigans, he narrowly lost that race. When the Governor illegally appointed Ma Carnahan to the Senate seat, Talent had to run for it in the special and won by only a narrow margin in '02, and so he never quite got a solid hold on a seat he didn't even hold for a full 4 years. His opponent was a rodent that most people didn't know about, only in that she had held some obscure statewide office by wider margins than Talent. Once the state sees her voting record as a U.S. Senator, she will be a one-term wonder. Unfortunately that wonder still has 5 years and 3 months left to go. Ditto for the junior asshat psycho Jim Webb in Vuhginnia.
As for DeWine, he was a conservative by voting record. It wasn't conservatism that worked against him in OH, but rather a string of individual stupid positions ("gang of 14," anti-gun) that separately eliminated entire sections of his conservative base. Still he lost big, and it can't all be attributed to Taft's unpopularity.
While I do not think "conservatism" is to blame for any of the losses, I do think there was a small but substantial Iraq defection by "moderates" and independents in EVERY state; a small but still important "sit out" by some conservatives in protest to the budgets and the Medicare bills; and a large "we need a change" sentiment across the board.
It is the latter that concerns me. As I wrote a week ago ("The Party of Bad Ideas vs. the Party of Old Ideas"), the GOP is now viewed as having no "new" ideas. It will NOT sell to say "well, we are in line with the Constitution." Reagan understood that and leapfrogged Jimmy Carter by selling tax cuts as "full employment and recovery" and by jumping over MAD to argue for "rolling back" the Soviet Empire. We are in desperate need of a party-wide "marketing plan" that will portray the GOP as moving forward, not just holding the line. I have argued in the WoT this needs to be a new, aggressive plan against not only Iran but against the radical schools in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere; a kind of "Marshall Plan/Voice of Arabia" approach. In domestic policy, a radical new free-market "cut the fat out" approach to medical care, rewarding doctors with some sort of tax breaks when they accept cash over employer-insurance. But whether it's THESE specific ideas or something else, there is no doubt in my mind that whatever happens in the presidential election, we will lose another clump of seats in both houses if we don't appear to be the party of NEW ideas.