The Republican party, especially the Establishment that depend on the Karl Rove types for “advice”, has shown over and over that they can, indeed, “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”.
In 1952, Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois stood up on the convention floor and stated, in the wake of five successive defeats for the Presidency, that “We have followed you before, and you took us down the road to defeat...” referring particularly to the back-to-back defeats of Thomas Dewey, who famously “won” the 1948 election, against a President who should have been easily defeated that year.
At the time, Dirksen was advocating the nomination of Robert Taft, a well-respected and nationally known Republican leader, rather than Dwight Eisenhower, as it was still undetermined if Eisenhower was even a Republican.
It ended up, as national leaders go, that Ike turned in a respectable record, but he had a determined stance of being “non-partisan” in the selection of Federal judges, which gave us the “Warren Court” and the endless mischief that were wreaked upon the judicial system, where new and unusual interpretations of the Constitution were “discovered”.
So while in the short term, by selecting a man universally liked by the public, but not committed to Republican virtues, the Republicans “won” the Presidency, the principles upon which the party claimed to be founded were compromised again and again.
And even in 1960, Ike only gave the most tepid of support to Richard Nixon, probably (considering the closeness of the overall vote) shifted the victory to JFK, thus setting up the most over-compensating term of the Presidency up to then, in the years 1969 to 1974, when Nixon was determined to “get even” with his critics and opponents. Had Nixon been elected in 1960, many of the foreign policy mistakes of the Kennedy-Johnson years would have been avoided. But now, we have the luxury of looking back, and then, the potential futures were still relatively unknown.