Firstly, NC Senator is one of the best, most informative posters on this board.
Secondly-the vast bulk of the GOP electorate doesn't care about abstract issues like "the size of government" or other National Review/Ron Paul style niche economic issues. The Tea Party movement was initially very Libertarian/small government and anti-war, but rather small when Bush was still in office. By mid 2009-2010, the big money donors got involved and it swelled into a juggernaut movement, but it's focus moved onto cultural wedge issues rather than Libertarian Doctrine.
Trump got the Tea Party's full fledged support without much in the way of fiscal conservatism or constitutional originalism. He accomplished this with making immigration policy front and center, rejecting the ongoing Middle Eastern wars, attacking NAFTA against the backdrop of a long dying domestic industry, and mastery of both social media and traditional media manipulation. Tapping Pence and Scalia's passing got him the Evangelicals full support.
The vast Tea party voting base never cared about hardcore fiscal conservatism (evidenced by their support for Trump) and GOP voters who did nearly all lined up behind Trump once nominated because the other option was, well.. Hillary Clinton.
What fiscal conservatives, particularly those who bemoan the populist trend like much of National Review's staff or posters like Dean Heller have to understand, is that enthusiastic Paul Ryan-ite fiscal conservatism is political poison to 70+ percent of the electorate. Furthermore, the white-collar suburban voters that left the GOP are NOT coming back and won't come back unless the DNC goes full fledged Squad/Labour, which ain't happening. The GOP needs to persuade new voters, particularly those under 40 and populist economics appear far more "compassionate" then Reaganomics.
You have literally no evidence to back that up, and you're letting your political opinions seep in here. A higher % of GOP voters define as fiscally vs socially conservative. A ticket with Paul Ryan on it got a higher % of the vote than Trump did. Every GOP candidate since 1976 has run on a platform of free market conservatism mixed with socially conservative values, and that has been one of the most successful periods for our party, ever. And the Tea Party being about cultural wedge issues must be a joke -- it was literally built around hatred for Obamacare, a policy that would be at 90% in most countries, yet is even now at just 50-39 and was steadily in the negatives before Trump came into office and made support for it = opposition to him. But sure king, go off on how arguing for a government that doesn't buy people's diapers for them is so damn abstract.
It's important to make the distinction between politically engaged people like us (who make up a small minority of the population) who are also on the right compared to politically disengaged normies, who are the massive bulk of the population. Someone who reads Daily Wire or National Review everyday and reads Sowell and Friedman (as I do or did) and is a total policy wonk is going to have different priorities and convictions than their Facebook aunts. But politics is an art performance about convincing half the people that you are the least-bad choice, that a know-it-all like Ben Shapiro won't necessarily succeed at.
Romney/Ryan also got 100 fewer EVs than Trump/Pence, and lost the PV by 4 instead of 2. Both Romney and Ryan, however experienced and brilliant they may be, were both mediocre politicians at least on the national level. I've read Sowell extensively so I feel I have a solid grasp on Free market/Austrian economics (and I was a libertarian for 4 years), but if the prevailing narrative in politics and the media is that supply side economics are awful for the 99% (based off the absurd predication that "the pie" is static and can't grow) and 70% of the country believes that, the GOP unfortunately has to work within those confines. Having the right policy means little if you can't get elected, and the GOP has serious issues getting elected.
Bush junior and John McCain were hardly Milton Friedman disciples, so forgive me if attacking Hawley's betrayal of the old GOP economic agenda falls on deaf ears. The old, pre-Trump GOP deserves
at least half of the blame for driving away moderate suburban voters, how do you expect a return to the neocons will convince them to return??
Trump proved in 2015 that you don't have to be a hardcore fiscal conservative to gain the hearts and souls of the Tea party base. There was alot more enthusiasm for him than Romney, and Romney was running against the face of the ACA earlier, only 1-2 years after the TP was at it's peak strength. You're absolutely correct that the ACA (and the very partisan matter which Obama acted on that and other matters) had an outsized role in the growth of the Tea Party in 2009-10. But the Libertarian, anti debt/defecit, anti tax, anti war principles that the TP was
founded upon in
2008 were far less relevant 5 years later once the ACA was actually implemented, what drove the bulk membership of people online who identified with the TP movement (who weren't hard core political nerds like we are) was always social issues if it wasn't the ACA.
