This won’t surprise everyone but it turns out that Rush Limbaugh is an idiot. To wit:
Going after moderates, independents, and all these yokels is not the blueprint. The blueprint’s there, 1994, taking back the House, the blueprint’s there. Why are these people ignoring it?
Of course, as Daniel Larison points out, the GOP won in 1994 in large part because it was able to appeal to many more independent voters than it had in 1992. (Clinton’s less than stellar first two years in office obviously also helped). As I have suggested, once a party’s brand has become contaminated – as was the case with the Tories in the mid-1990s and the GOP now – you cannot simply retreat to first principles and assume that the public will forgive and forget your sins. It doesn’t work like that. And, again as the Tories discovered, once the brand has been contaminated the base is no longer enough to win.
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