After Mitt Romney took a drubbing in the 2012 presidential election GOP party leaders circulated a now famously leaked autopsy report. It’s overarching message: we will keep losing presidential elections unless we can convince general election voters that we are not a bunch of old, white, racist, misogynist, anti-gay, anti-immigrant asshats. 

Okay, that’s my summary, not theirs. What it actually said was, “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.”

But today’s Republican presidential hopefuls are arguably a good deal more extreme than 2012’s Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul. And they won’t finish out-wingnutting each other for another two or three months.

How did GOP leaders so manifestly fail to take their own advice?  They were talking to the wrong people. They were talking to party insiders: Republican governors, state party chairs, elected officials and the consultants who serve them. They may also have been talking to their core voters, but that’s equally useless if they want change.

Presidential candidates are chosen by national convention delegates, who are chosen by state delegates, who are chosen by congressional district delegates, who are chosen by precinct delegates. Whether they are chosen in a caucus or a primary, the folks who mostly control this process are not the party elite. They are party activists, the dedicated few who canvass their neighbors, who host GOP candidates in their homes, who give up their weekends to leafleting at the county fair or the supermarket or the skating rink.

GOP party activists not only live in the ideological cul-de-sac, they own it. Inflamed by the fear-based rhetoric spewed by right-wing media, the choosers of the 2016 GOP nominee have herded themselves into a nativist dead-end and barricaded it against everyone who fails to share their paranoid fantasies.

This is structural. As the nominating process is increasingly dominated by the extreme right, demographic shifts have continued tilting the general electorate incrementally leftward. Any GOP nominee who is far enough to the right to be nominated has an impossibly long trek back towards the center to win the general election. He or she must espouse wildly conservative positions during the primary season and then soften, walk-back, or obfuscate those same positions in the general election. This makes the candidate appear to be a liar, a flip-flopper, or at best a person utterly lacking conviction.

There’s nothing to be done about the demographics. Even cynical Republican tactics to suppress voting rights can’t keep up with the changing face of America. (Side note: I picked up a favorite new political term when Ted Cruz started referring to immigrants as “undocumented Democrats.”)

If GOP leaders are serious about nominating a presidential candidate who is capable of winning, they need to be engaging not the denizens of the cul-de-sac but rather those Republicans who are currently disengaged.

By which I mean moderate Republicans and Independents. Empower these folks. Encourage them to show up at precinct meetings and bring their friends with them. Tell them it’s okay to talk back to the fear-mongering haters and take back their nominating process. You might have a shot at sending someone to the general election in November who can actually win.