Until the GOP drops the religious right, its gone.
The GOP doesn't have to drop the religious right, they just need to stop putting so much emphasis on social issues and governing by hostage crisis.
George HW Bush was a pragmatic conservative who won the last GOP landslide and carried much of the Northeast by convincing margins. That's what the Republican Party has to return to: pragmatic conservativism. We don't have to drop the Religious Right or become the Democratic Party. Just stop being ing insane about everything.
Winning elections and being conservative are not mutually exclusive.
That was also at a time of important electoral flux as it was the GOP's last romp in New England. His victories there probably had more to do with image, the economy, and tradition rather than his political stances, seeing how right he veered in order to make sure he had the nomination lined up for him in '88.
Remember that after the 1990s, "law and order" more or less disappeared as a significant electoral issue. For most of the mid- and late-20th century, Republicans had that advantage. People were worried about violent crime and domestic unrest. You had protests in the '60s, all those people trying to assassinate Gerald Ford in the '70s, the crack epidemic in the '80s. The Rodney King riots in 1992. Bill Clinton and the Democrats more or less had to play on Republican turf to win in the '90s by going on about school uniforms and having Tipper Gore talk about banning violent video games and whatever else was going on.
That's not an issue anymore. Not even uptight suburban moms are worried about being "tough on crime." Even conservatives have come around to the idea that simply throwing the book at people for minute infractions might not be the best strategy. Scaling back criminal sentencing and drug laws dovetails perfectly between social liberals who want a more lenient approach to drug use and who are concerned about high incarceration rates among minorities, and fiscal conservatives who finally realized that prisons are really expensive to run.
