Replies

I will wait to read your post describing your experiences in making decisions like these.

My experience? I decide when to open my checkbook, I decide how much to write and I decide to whom to send it.

What goes on behind the scenes in the party is frankly irrelevant. I am not, nor do I want to be, a party hack. The more I observe what happens in the party as you get closer to the top, the more disgusted I get. What matters to me are the results - what do we say we believe and who is going to best represent those beliefs. Electability as defined by polls should be used as a last resort to choose between two otherwise qualified candidates, not as a first resort to see who we can slip into office with an (R) behind their name, and then, if they half-heartedly believe in a couple of pieces of the party platform, well that's a bonus.
I really couldn't care less about the Republican party as an organization. I'd vote (D) in a hearbeat if they embraced conservative ideals. If they just pretended to, it would put them about even with the current Republican party, IMHO.

Opinion poles, popularity poles and name-recognition polls? The very fact that you bring these up indicates that you just don't get it, and your friends making decisions don't either. This is exactly why many like me have stopped sending our hard-earned money to the corrupted party organization.

The Republican party is a tool for advancing conservative ideals. I'm not voting because I want to see little (R)s on CSpan, I'm voting to advance an agenda - an agenda that the Republican party platform says Republicans believe in. If the candidates can't do that, then I'd much prefer they didn't run so the party and its platform don't get tarred with the failures caused by going against them.

A perfect example is the fiscal disaster when Republicans held Congress. The 2004 platform has plenty to say about lowering spending, spending responsibly, etc. So what good did it do to hold Congress for those two years? We sure as heck didn't demonstrate the superiority of Republican leadership. We didn't demonstrate our ideas were better - because we didn't even try them. Worse, we didn't demonstrate that we actually believe in what the party stands for, which throws the whole platform into suspicion and will likely cost us any hope for control of Congress for decades along with any further USSC nominations. So yeah, we grabbed control of Congress, and not only did it matter little, it made things worse for our agenda. Lets keep doing the same thing, because its working so well.

"The candidate MUST mirror the tastes of the majority of that District's voters."

Here's a crazy idea. Maybe you should sit down. If a Republican acting as a Republican doesn't mirror the tastes of a majority of that district's voters then he/she doesn't deserve to be elected and shouldn't be elected. If he has to be a RINO to get elected and the party is fine with that, then we had darned well better take a look at what our party stands for, because we obviously don't believe any of it is actually true.

One of the main reasons the party was founded was to eliminate slavery. Should we have compromised on slavery to get elected? We're supposed to be the party of limited government and fiscal restraint. What good does it do for us to run someone who doesn't believe in that - a major Republican idea? I don't expect to find someone who is 100% conservative, but we can't even get candidates that act like they agree with more than one or two major planks of the platform.

There are more than a few candidates on the other side of the aisle that we could elect that would be that conservative, so what benefit are we getting for keeping this RNC circus alive?

Better to donate to the individual over the collective, which oddly enough sounds more in alignment with conservative (and apparently formerly Republican) principles anyway.