O, I dunno. Everyone in South Cacrolina who voted Democrat, whose Daddy, Grandaddy, and Great Grandaddy voted Democrat? Who believe in God, and go to a church, who fly the flag on the 4th of July, place their sons and daughters in the military, etc.? Maybe your relatives during the Depression?
Although perhaps an endangered species, many otherwise good conservative people WERE traditionally Democrats .... i.e. Southern Baptists, Blue Collar Catholics, etc, etc..
Waddayou, one of these holier-than-moi nouveaux conservatives who don't recognize or acknowledge people in the other party in the Two Party System?
Maybe this will refresh your memory: those Democrats who voted for Ronald Reagan by the millions. Ignore them at your peril in your quest for elected office.
This is what you are skating past in your analysis of various political scenarios: The Two Party System includes people in both parties who disagree ... and agree ...with you and me. You want to be in a political party in which everyone agrees with you? OK, then! Move to France or Italy.
Now let me straighten you out about me and Slick Willard. I dislike the SOB for the standard conservative reasons. HOWEVAH ... if said SOB is the GOP Nominee, I will not only hold my nose and vote for the SOB, I will campaign for him, and woe betide any "Conservative" whom I catch on the couch in the trailer park on Election Day.
BTW, I have actually won elected local offices several times on the Republican ticket; see that you do the same. It means getting the votes of people with whom you disagree ... and who disagree with you! Figure it out.
Right-wing Democrats (by way of being Conservative) don’t exist anymore. The media considers those to be Marxist instead of Stalinist Democrats. Post-Watergate, you could count them on 1 hand those serving in Congress. Now, if you mean by voters, that’s a bit more complicated, but for those who chose to bitterly-cling to a Marxist Party, their votes betrayed any claims to Conservatism.
As for my relatives, the one most prominent politically in my family during the Depression, my grandmother, was a Democrat, but VERY left-wing, and her diatribes helped to make me a Conservative. She hated Conservatives/Republicans so much that she denied her cousin, a very popular GOP Mayor of St. Louis, was anything but a Democrat (which would’ve been news to him, running prominently against the FDR ticket in 1932 for the U.S. Senate).
Me holier than thou ? I’m just one who has been chin deep in politics since I was knee high to a june bug and learned a lot more than most would want or care to know. I’ve seen the whole spectrum. The unadultered, ugly corruption and pure evilness of the Democrat Party, and the stupidity and gutless weaselry of the GOP.
As for Reagan Democrats, those folks become Republicans 20-30 years ago. If they’re still voting Democrat, as I said above, they’re not Conservative.
I do not expect everyone in a given party to agree on every single issue, but there has to be some basic agreements on key issues. If you have candidates who are antithetical to those points (or claiming to be for them while their records betray them), you’ve got a big problem. I’m fairly good with picking out “problem” people who end up leaving a given office in far worse shape than going in. In other words, a big ass RINO detector (or more to the point, an anti-Conservative “R” detector). Now while about 99.99999% of Democrats set off the radar, I can also sense Democrat Trojan Horses, and it seems to be more and more of those running for the higher offices, a frightening prospect.
It’s your business whom you vote for in November. But I’ve spent far too much time and have too much of a sense of conscience and ethics to support the Trojan Horses that manage not only to slip behind the walls, but earn the full-fledged support of people who ought to know better. Either these folks have been lying to us all along, or they are willfully stupid, and neither speaks well for the party. If that’s the case, we need a full-scale purge of the problem people, or perhaps just a new party altogether. It’s not written in stone that the GOP is to remain a party for perpetuity anymore than it was for the Whigs, the Know-Nothings, the Federalists, the Greenbackers, the Nullifiers or the Monster Raving Loonies.
To your last point, I have been asked to run for office, but health limitations make that an exceptionally difficult prospect. I also live in a heavily Democrat locale (Nashville hasn’t really been two party since the 1850s, when it was a Cotton Whig stronghold, and the GOP never took hold beyond a few unusual occasions, and hasn’t elected a GOP Congressman since two Democrats split the vote in 1872 when U.S. Grant was running for reelection). My district is also a rotten borough (illegals galore) and a VRA-protected one (for a Black State Senator based out of downtown who ignores all but ‘Holder’s Peeps’). I have pretty much spent my political life knowing what it’s like to be perpetually UN-represented.