The direction of the Republican Party if TRUMP loses

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The GOP is not like the Democrats. Hoping for a Bill Clinton to just come along and essentially goven as a Republican would have thirty years prior is not going to happen. No Republican is going to come along and govern like Bill Clinton and win the nomination.

The GOP is only going further down the rabit hole of nationalism because that is its only hope of moderating on economics, and moderating on economics is the only way to win elections.

People will default to voting their economic interest unless you give them a valid social issue to override the default response. In 1992, the Republicans lost among secular, upper middle class surburban dwellers because 1) The economy went bad and for the first time they got hit hard and 2) the social issues the GOP used to keep others in line, did nothing to keep them in line and actually made worse the situation. Taxes had been brought way down and that was their override switch prior. The GOP was victim of their own success. 

All you really need to do on the main social issues is not go extreme like Todd Akin/Ted Cruz. Take the Reagan approach of pro-life with exceptions and that leaves open up to a 15% win in place like MO and IN and single digit wins in the rest of the midwest. It does not however win you those people, it merely opens the door.

The way you win them is on the economy, jobs, infrastructure and education and Trumpism is the first time that I have seen, that the GOP has moved towards less hard-line economic libertarianism instead of more in favor of it.

Besides what really matters when it comes to family values. It is going as far as possible on the few hot button social issues to lay down a marker or do family and community represent an all encompassing view and approach to society and economic policy. In which case, it is hard to reconcile that desire for stable families/communities with the constant disruption of libertarian economic policies, especially free trade and massive immigration. It is easy to decouple the two and put social conservative and economic libertarianism in these two seperate boxes and insist they exist in a vacuum,  if you are an upper middle class political science student isolated from reality and sheltered from other viewpoints, but for those who live in the real world it is not hard to see.