Republican did not win because they've lost touch with regular people, and they will never win again until they find it back.
That's exactly it right there. One of the problems is the rapidly changing electorate. Currently, 70 percent of Americans eligible to vote are white. In 1980 that figure was 85 percent. That's not that big of a problem in mid-term elections, when young and minority voters are far more likely than older, white voters to stay home. That's why in mid-terms you see a lot of Republicans elected locally and in Congress. But for presidential elections, more young and minority voters go to the polls, putting the older white voters closer to minority status (in 50 years that 70 percent may actually be less than 50 percent).
In 2012, President Obama lost white voters by a larger margin than any winning presidential candidate in U.S. history. In his reelection, Obama lost ground from 2008 with almost every conceivable segment of the white electorate. With several key groups of whites (i.e., white Catholics, married men, married women, blue collar workers, college educated, Democrat-leaning, etc.), he recorded the weakest national performance for any Democratic nominee since the Republican landslides of the 1980s. And yet he still won by a comfortable margin.
Republicans have to either court and win over record numbers of minorities, or convince as many Republican voters as possible to actually show up and vote. As long as the GOP nominates someone competent, they start off with 46 percent of the vote and a large chunk of the electoral college. Getting to 270 + 1 electoral votes and then to 50 percent of the popular balloting requires trade-offs and choices.
Find the swing states where demographic composition of the electorate has been volatile and where there is room among those demographic groups to grow the GOP's share. Put the two together. Of course, the demographic trends don't favor the Republicans. That means Democrats will have somewhere between 200 and 250 electoral votes in the bank by election day. Republicans have to focus on the states where they can make headroom. There are some states that will vote Democrat no matter what the Republicans do, but states like Iowa, Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are states where things to go to the GOP.
The only way to push things over the top is to get back in touch with regular people, especially in those states. That means blue collar workers and married women, mostly. The issue important with blue collar workers and married women are not the issues of the religious right, they are the issues of economic security, jobs, quality of life. The GOP will have to moderate its tone on social issues, otherwise they come of as being preachy and telling people what to do and how to live their lives. As is noted in
this article from a couple of years ago, by shifting traditional Republican positioning on divisive social issues, and by investing in new media platforms, the Republican Party can come back from the brink, and be truly competitive with Democrats, because they'll be bring in more of the youth vote along with the white, over 30 vote.
