The better question is, "How can we better the Republican candidate be selected, such that the greatest number of Republican voters will support the winning candidate?"
There are several good answers to this question, as well as several good answers as to how NOT to do it.
One better solution would be to hold the earliest primaries in states with historical high percentages of Republican voters, which coincidentally tend to be the more conservative states. Those with primaries limited to registered Republicans should top the list. Otherwise, non-Republicans tend to vote in the primaries for candidates that conservative Republicans would not support.
Some of those traditional conservative states would be Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. Last in the season would be those states that allow cross-over voting, whether in caucuses or primaries.
We know that the state parties decide their dates, but the national party has some influence over those decisions. In recent decades, the RNC has exerted their influence to ensure that conservatives have less chance of getting elected.
The better question is, "How can we better select the Republican candidate, such that the greatest number of Republican voters will support the winning nominee?"
Some pretty reasonable possible proposals as to what to do in the future.
But it still leaves unanswered the question as to who you would have nominated.
It also begs the question as to why the Republicans would listen to someone took a hike during the election?
These are some good suggestions to mull over.
However, this still doesn’t solve the basic problem that either there are not enough conservatives (as that term is used by many here), or conservatives are not active enough, to emerge a candidate.
If conservatives could not unite in the face of the Witch and Obama, and in the face of the clear and present fact that if they didn’t emerge a more conservative candidate (yes, there were several that were running) a less conservative candidate would be nominated, I don’t see what in the world will ever unite conservatives again.
The “my way or the highway” mentality has become too pervasive and too pernicious. Much like the continual sprouting of new religious denominations, this only leads to fractionalization in a situation where only a union-like mentality / enterprise has practical efficacy.
Proof: lately I have frequently been asking people if all the reforms they’d like to see made to the primary system were made-—including even a national primary day-—and John McCain still won the nomination, would they vote for him in the general election?
Many say “no.”
This is proof that the complaint is not with the process, but simply with the result. That being the case, no process reforms can “fix” the fact that people feel they have a right to “feel good” and warm and fuzzy about their vote.
Until people stop thinking of their vote as a personal statement that they approve of everything about the person they voted for, rather than as a hiring action that has to be done regardless of how stinky the applicants are, we will end up in the place we’re at now every time.