I'm sorry, but placing your own principles FIRST....before the welfare of the nation, is nuts.
For what reason? So, you don't slit your neck while looking at yourself in the mirror while shaving?
For example: " 'I' withheld my vote.....'I'm' not responsible if the RAT wins!.....it's the other rubes who didn't vote for my chosen candidate"
In case 'you' haven't noticed, the contrast between the parties is SO clear...good vs. evil.....that there's NO EXCUSE for not voting for the eventual Republican candidate.
It doesn't mean you supported him....it means you support the concept that the other side is so treacherous to our way of life...that it's preferable to [vote for] the one the GOP puts up.
As MAC is now inclined to say...."JMHO"!
Imagine that there's a war going on.
Imagine that in this war, the home armies are trying to defeat and remove an invading army from their soil.
Imagine that the sort of conservative that you just addressed in your post makes up one of the divisions in that home army.
The army at large wants to go after the invading army wherever they are, while the conservative division believes that the best plan is to pick a strong defensible spot at the beachhead where the invaders first made landfall, dig in and wait for the invaders to come to them.
The army splits up, the main body goes after the invaders while the conservative division digs in at the beach where the invaders landed, believing that was the best spot to defeat them, and wait there.
The main body finds the invaders, engages them, and drives them back to the beach.
Once the battle gets to the beach, the conservative division jumps in and the invaders are defeated and driven from the country.
The conservative division will then stand up and take claim to the defeat of the invaders because their plan to wait for them at the beach was proven right.
The problem is that the ONLY reason that the invading army was at that beach, is because the main body pushed it there.
That, in a nutshell, is the whole "I won't vote for a non-conservative" thing boils down to.
The day that a sufficiently conservative candidate is balloted, it will be because the moderate faction of the GOP has swung that pendulum enough to the right to finally reach the entrenched, non-budging conservative division, and NOT due to the actual efforts of the conservatives.