Loose-loose combination?

[Admin]

TNR has an article arguing that the Republican party has gotten it backwards, doubling down on the traditional Republican platform based on the culture wars, combined with Trump's more radical ideas like building a wall:

Trump is racist and demagogic, but he’s also secular and focused on workers, not the Wall Street tycoons and religious right that have driven Republican policy for the past three decades. In that spirit, Trump dialed back on Republican nostrums like the opposition to abortion and gay marriage, and struck a cautious tone on military intervention. That he won the primary by opposing party orthodoxy essentially obliterated the assumption that ideological conservatives were a majority faction within the GOP...

Still, Trump’s rise should have been a reckoning for the political insiders and activists who were drafting the Republican platform in Cleveland last week. But there was no such soul-searching. They doubled-down on the culture wars while also adopting Trump’s most extreme positions. The platform that will be presented on Monday calls for erecting a wall along the Mexican border, the demand that the government “destroy ISIS.” But it also calls for blocking women from serving in combat roles in the military, abolishing federal funding for abortion, and rolling back the spread of pornography, which Republicans lament as a “public health crisis.” The platform, in other words, is caught between two poles, both of which are toxic to much of the country. This was a missed opportunity for the Republicans. Had they adopted the softer social positions championed by Trump, and retained their traditional devotion to free trade, military intervention, and trickle-down economics, their party might have become more palatable to the broader public. Instead, Republican insiders drafting the platform redoubled their efforts to pull the party further to the right.

The Republican Party Blew It | New Republic

They should have done it backwards, adopting Trump's more moderate position on the culture wars (and, we argue, his moderate position on social security and medicare, which are popular at the base) but stressed the party's traditional platforms of open trade and engagement with the world.

[Martin K]

So are you saying that they picked the worst part of Trump and the worst part of the traditional Republican platform, whilst they should have done the opposite?

But what are those 'worst' parts? The Trump worst part are actually rather popular!

[Admin]

Actually, you have a point there, Martin.

There are fairly unpopular positions in the traditional Republican platform, such as the scaling down of the welfare state (Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare). 

The soul searching after the 2012 loss pointing towards a more inclusive party (because of changing values and demographics), which resulted in the attempts to reform immigration have quickly been forgotten. In fact, Trump can be seen as a reaction to this. 

On the other hand, Trump isn't much of a culture warrior, nor a religious fundamentalist. 

So basically Trump has forged a new electorate which is rejection part of the 'broader appeal' post 2012 diagnosis (the part against Muslims and immigration), but passively embracing others. He departs from traditional Republican positions on trade and the welfare state, which were never very popular with the constituencies in the first place.