I'm not considering breaking from the party if my candidate loses because conservatives have slandered my candidate. I'm considering breaking from the party because the other candidates suck so much.
Exactly! The rest of the pack save Hunter suck!
I'll go you one better than that:
I didn't break with the GOP because they stopped winning; I broke with the GOP because they broke with my Conservative foundations, which were also theirs.
When the GOP subjugated Conservatism to the perceived expediency of "big tent" centrism as a tool to win votes, my support evaporated overnight. Yeah, Republicans keep getting elected, but the positions those Republicans take on key issues has also kept drifting leftward. Today's Republican talking points make Hubert Humphrey sound like a Heritage Foundation policy wonk.
THAT isn't Conservatism; it's the smarmy politics of compromised principles. It might win elections, but it won't help America. All it will do is ensconce a more moderate breed of leftism in office (hello, Governor Schwarzenegger??), and precipitate a longer, slower, more painful slide into oblivion.
The antidote is not lockstep loyalty to any and every Presidential nominee with an "R" tacked onto his name; the antidote is lockstep, broken glass, do-or-die loyalty to the Foundational Conservative principles upon which this Republic rests.
Those who advocate unity behind the eventual GOP nominee, regardless of who it may be, hold a position that is advantageous to the party, but potentially deadly to the Republic; a position that ranks GOP victory above the principles undergirding the Constitution, in the false belief that the two are, somehow, synonymous.
GONE are the days when GOP victory meant, a de facto victory for Conservative principles, and -- by extension -- for the Nation that is founded upon them. We have Republican candidates in this election who are farther left than JFK. We cannot, in good conscience, go to the polls next November and pull the lever for one of them, not even on the basis that "less left is better than more left".
When "left" equates to the euthanization of the Republic -- and it pretty much does -- voting for someone because they're "less left", is simply advocating that the euthanization be done in stages, rather than in one fatal dose; the end result is the same.
I'll not be party to it; if there's not a Conservative on the ticket in November, the GOP won't get my vote for their Presidential candidate, plain and simple.