On a local level, they can win. In a conservitive area, they can win. Not on a national level. I think the numbers proved it, and so does the map. Romney got his butt kicked by the large LIBERAL population centers.
That is counter-factual. No Republican is likely to win the large LIBERAL population centers, social issues or no. No Republican presidential campaign plans to win that way. That's American presidential politics 101. Social conservatives like Reagan and Bush DID win, but they did so by motivating enough social and fiscal conservatives to counterbalance the big cities. (Of course, Reagan even won most of what would be called blue states today.) Also, social conservatives like John Ashcroft and Rick Santorum have been elected to the Senate. Ashcroft and Huckabee were governors. They clearly were able to succeed outside of "conservative areas."
Again, IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO BROUGHT THE SUBJECT UP. Seriously, how do you justify you're last statment. I didn't said the Republicans or Romney made an attack on those issues. In fact, they tried to avoid the subject.
There you go. That is the difference between an attack and a half-hearted defense. When I said "attack," I was referring to a piece of legislation like the AWB. Or at least something substantive to advance their own platform. We saw that the Democrats made an attack on something and were punished for it in the polls. On social conservatism, we have NOT seen that with the Republicans. In 2004, the GOP profited from the fact that marriage was on the ballot in many states, and social conservatives turned out in droves to support conservative positions and GOP candidates. We haven't seen anything to refute that lesson. Nor have we seen the GOP punished for their abortion stance, Akin notwithstanding. Ersatz marriage won in a few states last week, but they were blue states. That may be evidence that
the crazy ersatz marriage is becoming more acceptable, but that doesn't make it some kind of third rail that no one can touch. For a comparison, look at how backward some states are on guns. Yet the pro-gun movement has been doing pretty well.
But the issues still got brought up and once they did, bing bang, Romney and fellows couldn't hold out. The subject is a canidate killer
False. Not knowing how to defend your own position is the candidate-killer. The rape-abortion issue has been controversial for decades, and social conservatives like Todd Akin (in fact, Todd Akin himself) have been elected over and over again, holding the same view that Akin does. The fact that two people made a similar mistake in the same election cycle would be a poor foundation for dropping an anti-abortion stance that has been good for the party in many other elections, and is likely to help in the future.
A party that was unified behind its own candidates and policy positions would have had a standard response ready for such things. Something like, "No innocent person should be executed for something a criminal did to someone else." Something like that. Judging the popularity of a policy on the worst possible presentation of it is patently misleading. And by that I mean that you are misleading yourself.