That’s a rather simplistic view.
A lot of good conservatives lost in 2008. They didn’t lose because they were conservative, but they lost.
The problem with trying to make a political party “my way or the highway” is that nobody thinks alike, and the more things you put on the list, the fewer people will agree with your position on all of them.
You have things on this list that conservatives disagree with, depending on their ‘flavor’ of conservatism. But beyond that, not everybody who is “conservative” is conservative on every issue.
The attempt to define “conservative” by a list of issues is hard enough. To then limit yourself to people who are the same as you on those issues will guarantee you a minority party of no consequence, kind of like the libertarian and constitution parties today.
In countries where they do parties like this, they have dozens of parties, they all win a few seats, and then they make “coalitions”, where the members of the coalition don’t agree on everything but decide to “get along”.
In our country, we’ve decided to do “coalition-building” at the party level. That necessitates parties that have some leeway, both in degree and application.
SO not only does the pro-life movement allow for different “meanings” of pro-life when endorsing candidates, but the republican party includes fiscally conservative, limited-government libertarian types who don’t agree with the pro-life position.
As a website, Free Republic can certainly factionalize — we are already only a small portion of the republican party. But if the party exists to create a ruling majority, it has to be a bigger tent than could exist under the guidelines specified here.
Now, these are great guidelines for deciding who to vote for in a republican primary. The way you eliminate those you disagree with is at the ballot box, not by imposing a purity test.
We lost elections because the Rinos in Washington backed big government. We won in 94 because of the Contract with America. People WANT smaller government and less taxes. Either the RNC goes there, or we all lose.
I agree with you 99.999%