RNC Elders Determine Conservative 'Purity' Costs GOP Elections

The Republican National Committee’s internal evaluators argued that true conservatism loses the Republican Party elections in a new report released Monday. The evaluators were charged by chairman Reince Priebus with helping the GOP reach a larger voter base. A copy of their report was obtained by Breitbart News.

On page 54 of the report, authors Henry Barbour, Sally Bradshaw, Ari Fleischer, Zori Fonalledas and Glenn McCall argue that true conservatism hurts the Republican Party in elections. “Third-party groups that promote purity are hurting our electoral prospects,” they wrote.

That entire section was based on quotes from MSNBC host Joe Scarborough in a column the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan wrote last year.

“Peggy Noonan recently wrote about how our Party has stifled debate and how groupthink has taken over,” the report authors wrote. “She quoted Joe Scarborough saying, ‘Everybody’s afraid to talk.’ She then related that in 1994 the Republican Party “was alive with ideas: John Kasich on the budget, Jack Kemp on taxes, John Engler on welfare reform, Tommy Thompson on crime control. This was the bubble and fizz of a movement at its height.”

That was not the only time the RNC investigators quoted Noonan quoting Scarborough. “As Noonan quoted Scarborough again, ‘The national conversation is more constricted, with radio stars, websites and magazines functioning as unofficial arbiters and limiters of domestic and foreign policy debate,'” the report added. “Our friends and allies are in a strong position to help promote the Party’s ideas and encourage a diversity of ideas and solutions consistent with our core principles.”

Earlier on in the report, on page 5, the authors made the same argument against pure conservatism. “Instead of driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac, we need a Party whose brand of conservatism invites and inspires new people to visit us,” they wrote. “We need to remain America’s conservative alternative to big-government, redistribution-to-extremes liberalism, while building a route into our Party that a non-traditional Republican will want to travel. Our standard should not be universal purity; it should be a more welcoming conservatism.”