People who don't vote for President can not consider themselves the "base" of any party. Presidential candidates do - and should - spend most of their time attracting regular voters. A lot of people who consider themselves independents are more likely to vote than the Tea Party conservatives are.
Maybe it is time to have a third party. If Tea Party Conservatives aren't willing to vote for whoever the GOP nominee is, then maybe they should have their own party. After all, they wouldn't be taking votes away from the GOP. And the GOP nominee could be chosen for qualities like competence, executive experience, leadership skills and foreign policy knowledge, all of which are more important to accomplishment than just making speeches.
In my humble opinion, let's not allow the GOP establishment, liberals and the media to redirect us away from what should be our focus right now: STOPPING OBAMA and his agenda. We will soon have a new Congress ... they need to work for us not against us. Then we can worry about who's running for President in 2016.
With that being said, this has always been a difficult one for me. I refused to vote for McCain over Obama and voted 3rd party and look what happened. However, I voted my conscious. The two largest 3rd parties are the Constitution Party and the Libertarian Party of which they normally only get a fraction of the votes. IF TEA were to form their own party and run I feel that they would do better but perhaps not well enough to secure the oval office ... it depends on how well they campaign and how quickly they can get on the ballot in all 50 states and how well the GOP is able to change things now that we will have the majority.
We also need to consider two things; who is the opposition on the liberal side. Wigwam Warren would be worse than Obama and I would vote against her RINO or not. Secondly, a lot is going to ride on if 4,000,000 (more like 20,000,000) are indeed granted amnesty. We already have thousands of teenagers (illegal dumped just recently) who will be of voting age by 2016.
We will soon have the majority in BOTH houses ... we need to fully take advantage of that. We can win in 2016, but it depends on how we play our cards.