Exactly!! I also welcome every one of these new Republicans. We need everyone of them to build a majority.
I agree, AND we need to work to get back the conservatives who've left. And that means bringing the Party back to the Right.
The other day, I saw some leftard goober (I think it was Charles Johnson at LGF) crowing about how the GOP's identification share has dropped from 32% in 2004, to 28% in 2006, to 25% in 2008. This leftard was arguing that this is evidence that the GOP needs to move left, since it's "obviously" driving away moderates.
Nevermind the fact that the GOP has been moving steadily left since 2000, and has been bleeding a proportional percentage of its membership. Nevermind that conservatism IS mainstream, as both polls and election results abundantly show, and therefore staying to the Right would INCREASE our market share. Shoot, I've left the GOP at least a couple of times. I left when McCain won SC, and the only reason I rejoined was because I realised how stupid the idea of a conservative third party was, and decided it's a better bet to work within the Party to recapture it.
The way I figure it, the pool of registered voters in this country is ~200 million. This means the GOP loss from 32% to 25% (i.e. 7%) represents ~14 million voters who've ceased identifying themselves with the Party, and who probably also have given up on voting for the GOP as well.
Couple this with the fact that the total *increase* in votes cast in 2008 over 2004 was way down. In 2008, we saw a total of 9.0 million more votes cast from the 2004 total - note that this includes the unprecedented GOTV effort (legal and illegal) by the Obama campaign. Now, in 2004, we saw 16.8 million more votes cast than in 2000, and in 2000 we saw 9.1 million more votes cast than over 1996, even though neither of those years saw significant upswings from the "normal" GOTV pattern of either Party.
Given the massive GOTV by Obama's campaign, we should have seen a lot larger upswing in votes cast than we did. I would posit that part of this depression in voter turnout despite the GOTV efforts was due to a significant part of those 14 million conservatives not turning out for the GOP (and would attribute the 2006 midterm losses to the same). If those conservatives had had a truly conservative candidate to be excited about and vote for, we may well be talking abotu President Sanford or President Palin today.
I think the numbers and common sense refute the "we have to move left to pick up voters" nonsense.