I hear this all the time, and it has merit, yet the true meaning of it is misconstrued by many conservatives, including Rush Limbaugh.
As long as we don't stray from basic conservative values as illustrated so well by our best mentors on the fiscal economic side, we do well but better in times of economic stress.
When Conservatives get too comfy they begin to tinker with social conservatism, a political trap, and therein lies a big part of the self immolation factor. The other part being isolationist populism, which we ditched many years ago. Like Ron Paul.....Buchanan, and others before them.
Add the two political fault lines together and you have exactly what happened to the GOP in my State of Arkansas, and your example in California.
You lose the independents first and then the moderates. When you look closely, you have nothing left but irritated conservatives preaching to each other, and the rest have deaf ears.
So yes, you are correct about drifting away from conservative ideals being damaging, but I disagree with your definition of what is or is not a conservative ideal or mantra. The fact is, that socially we have always adhered to a belief in freedom to choose our own way, given the fact that we have all the information we need to do the right thing. We belief in the individual. We did not however, attempt to dictate what that choices were permitted.
We have, in modern times, believed strongly in free trade, yet when we attempt to dictate who we trade with, as in the ports debacle, we contradict ourselves. This is related solely to anti-arab fear, not a policy argument, and on the social side, the fear derived from actions on the left which caused a knee jerk reaction. None of this was smart politics and it added up to major defeat and a total rollback of everything we worked so hard for, in the thirty years that I participated.
That's it in a nutshell, as they say. Political hubris is not a good policy to maintain a broad coalition, and that's what they tried to do.
So now, there is no coalition, and there will not be one in November unless something very major in political terms, occurs before the election.
While I tend to be slightly more fiscally conservative than socially conservative, I have to admit that it was more social rather than fiscal conservatism that put the Republicans into power. In Ohio, the people tend to side with Republicans on social issues and Democrats on economic issues,despite how awful the Rats are on the economy.