Nah. Your prescription is just for slow poison. It still leads to death eventually.
We nominated Nixon twice, then Ford. Could have made a great argument after the 1976 Convention that conservatives should have just abandoned the GOP and gone out on their own, likely into oblivion.
What conservatives need to do is go back to first principles. They need to teach, speak, articulate, sell, persuade people about our founding principles. We are right. We need to start acting like we really believe it.
But this already is happening, right now. People argue here, they argue in public. Ted Cruz made the case (badly, I think, but he did make it). But for some reason, it isn't working.
Instead conservatives are constantly selling out because some poll just showed their position to be unpopular. Well, then MAKE IT POPULAR for goodness sake by repeating and repeating and repeating the position until the populace understands it again.
Again, this has been happening since Reagan in 1980 and yet, here we are. Not even enough of us to be a majority of a party that itself is only 30% of the electorate. How do you explain that?
We are losing because the ideals that formed our nation are not be taught any longer. There is only one road to correcting this. TEACH IT! PREACH IT! DEBATE IT! PERSUADE IT! Not by selling out. That is like standing on a bridge and saying "We must save this bridge," so in order to keep this spot I'm standing on, I'll sell the support beams underneath. Then eventually everything will be ok. IT WILL NOT BE OK.
Look, I actually agree with you on this. But how does that logically lead to a third party? The way things are now, a conservative who runs for the GOP nomination gets a huge platform. They're in the debates, they're on TV, radio, etc... If they are unable to persuade, well...that's on them. Live and learn, try again in 4 years. But the
opportunity to change minds is certainly there.
Remaining in the GOP is the best platform/bully pulpit we're going to get to try to expand and persuade. But as soon as we abandon that for some third party, we've reduced ourselves to preaching to a too-small choir, and nobody is even going to hear us, much less actually be persuaded. Individuals and politicians can remain ideologically strong while still remaining in the party.
The truth is that when it comes to persuading people, the messenger is just as important as the message. Being "right' doesn't mean squat if you are not persuasive. That means you have to find candidates who are not only "right",
but also adept at persuading those who don't already agree with them. That's just reality. And I'd submit that we haven't produced a conservative President candidate who was both clearly conservative
and persuasive since Reagan. And no amount of party-switching is going to change the need for us to find that kind of candidate.