Well you have to admit, we’d be much better off if Christine O’Donnell, Sharon Angle, Todd Akin, and Richard Mourdock hadn’t been nominated. They all took lead pipe cinches for the R’s, and gave them to the D’s.
And yes, the people they beat for the nominations weren’t as conservative. However, if you want to be a purist, then don’t complain when your party is perpetually in the minority.
Sorry not going along with your bashing of Christine O’Donnell.
Not at all.
I don't have a party.
OK, now how about all the GOP-E candidates in 2012 that lost? Including Romney. That knife cuts both ways.
I can also give you Tommy Thompson, Pete Hoekstra, Connie Mack, and Rick Berg who lost winnable (arguable in Hoekstra's case, but I thought it should have been close) races.
Ideology is only one part of what is or is not an electable candidate.
“Well you have to admit, we’d be much better off if Christine O’Donnell, Sharon Angle, Todd Akin, and Richard Mourdock hadn’t been nominated. They all took lead pipe cinches for the R’s, and gave them to the D’s.”
This pure fantasy, speculation or supposition on your part.
There is no reason to believe they were lead pipe cinches or that they would have won as opposed to the actual nominees who defeated the others in primary elections.
Mitt Romney, the lead pipe cinch did not win.
It's true we would have probably been better off had those candidates not been nominated. However, there's a good case to made that we'd be better off if Connie Mack IV, Ted Stevens, John N. Kennedy, Liddy Dole, and Lincoln Chafee hadn't been nominated
Those were all winnable Senate seats for the GOP, and the moderate establishment candidate lost it. They didn't lose because they were moderate establishment candiates, they lost it because they had baggage and made stupid mistakes on the campaign trail that cost us, and often had the misfortune of running in bad election years for the GOP (in Stevens case, he was already an unlikeable old RINO, but a bogus and baseless indictment from a liberal judge finished him off).
Likewise, Christine O’Donnell, Sharon Angle, Todd Akin, and Richard Mourdock didn't lose those races because they were tea party conservatives. They lost because they had baggage and made stupid mistakes on the campaign trail, and were often running in bad election years for the GOP.
Whenever some RINO loses, freepers will proclaim "if we ONLY woulda run a principled conservative for that seat, we woulda won!!!", whenever some stanch conservative loses, the GOP establishment claims they would have defeated the RAT if we would have run a squishy moderate. Neither scenario is correct. Anyone on the ideological spectrum can lose with the wrong type of candidate.
In many cases where the GOP establishment points to the "scary" conservative as the reason Republicans did so poorly in that state, their RINO establishment candidate did even worse when they ran him. Christine O’Donnell did poorly in her U.S. Senate race, but when the GOP establishment insisted on running RINO Jan Ting for the U.S. Senate as the only "viable" candidate in Delaware, he did worse than O'Donnell did and couldn't even get 30% of the vote. Ditto in Illinois -- the GOP establishment loves to blame Alan Keyes "scary" conservative views for causing him to lose to Obama in a landslide (and ignores the fact that he was also an 11th hour replacement candidate from out of state), but they ignore the fact that when they handpicked a "viable" establishment centrist as their candidate for the U.S. Senate (Steve Sauerberg) he was a complete joke and did even worse than Keyes -- winning only 3 of the state's 102 counties and getting under 30% of the vote against an unlikeable Democrat who compared U.S. troops to NAZIs. We need better Senate candidates, period.