I've heard numerous dejected Republicans in recent post-election days lament how, oh how, it could have all gone so wrong for them. Funnily, a regular self-criticism at the heart of where they believe changes need to be made is to their "messaging," or in other words, they need to "frame" what they are selling more effectively. While re-affirming their fundamental values to be correct, they assert it's just how they marketed them which was flawed. LOL!
What they still fail to get (a consequence of the "epistemic closure" they experience while consuming truthiness-based factoids from their Propaganda Ministry, Fox "News") is that it's what they represent - their basic beliefs and values; the planks they fight for; their acceptance of ever-enlarging gross disparities in wealth due to unfair laws allowing corporations and the one percent, like Mitt Romney, to game our system; their defense of corporations over people; their rejection of science and facts; their disrespect for people of color, women, and non-Christians, et al - that more and more Americans reject, not how they package these things.
They frequently like to claim America to be a "center-right" nation. Wrong! On issue after issue, as measured by many independent polls as well as at the voting box, we are much more a "center-left" country and becoming more so. As a political party which continues to push out moderates while it embraces ever more extremist true-believers, there is little hope for them to arrive anytime soon a different place. Despite their thorough trouncing, significant numbers of them will always believe (don't bother them with the facts) that the non-white dude squatting in the Oval Office was born in Kenya and has a fake birth certificate, was schooled in a Muslim madrassa, wants to convert America to socialism or communism, wants to take away everyone's guns, and is, frankly, destroying the United States. They'll double-down on watching Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Geraldo, "Fox & Friends," and the rest earnestly waiting for these gurus to reveal how the people can pretty-up the packaging of what they stand for so the country can be rescued from evil, if it's not too late by then.