The New Mexico Democratic Party is awful and I align with the Republicans in local elections. I was a big supporter of Dubya as well.
Politically, I support the conservative idea of eliminating bureaucracy but am against the Teabagger idea that there should not be wealth redistribution.
I consider myself aligned with Milton Friedman, who proposed replacing welfare programs with negative income tax, giving the poor money through the IRS without the need for intensive paperwork by other agencies. It's small government that doesn't screw the little guy.
Lawyers and accountants that try to prevent fraud in government programs at a higher cost than what fraudsters take are what make government programs dysfunctional in my opinion. It's not something today's Republicans care about, but it's not Democratic either.
In the end, while I am a NM Republican, I will never support a Republican candidate for President as it stands because when push comes to shove, I'll take an inefficient federal government that provides for the poor and lower middle class than one that efficiently ignores them.
You sound a lot like a lot of Colorado or Nevada Republicans or the opposite of many Oklahoma Democrats who like social programs but think that the current Dem policies are for "big government that screws the little guy". I knew a Conservative Republican who grew up in the middle east. She said that she didn't like Obamacare because of the entire death panel thing and that we should just have single payer instead.
Its true. In 1994, Republicans did very well but still lost the momentum by shutting down the Government over the little changes that Clinton made. However, they didn't lose any momentum they built a strong dynasty that almost ran uninterrupted for 12 years.
I also think that if we lose, its how we lose that matters. If our brand is crippled in states we need to do better in the long term, its more of a harbinger of things to come than if we lose by losing all the dems in the red states. That's why I was optimistic after 2010, because we were able to contain our loses in some blue states and most of the losses were states that had a long record of Rockerfeller Republicanism (voting blue on top and red on the bottom).