USA Republican Party  - in recent times, it has been defined by the "Regan coalition", a mix of (a) social conservatives, (b) defence conservatives, and (c) anti-tax conservatives...their main policy objectives have been = less government, traditional values, and strong defence.

Business conservatives can never win a majority without the support of “values voters” (there just are not enough people around who look like Mr Romney). “Values voters” can never produce a viable governing coalition without the help of the business elite.

The coalition has served the Republicans handsomely in the past—they will have held the White House for 20 of the past 28 years and controlled the House for 12 years from 1995.

In recent times (especially under President Bush), we have seen a breaking of this coalition as Bush has gone into heavy public spending and angered many of the business conservatives.  Whether the party can be reunited remains to be seen. 

Mr Bush's Republicans also made serious policy errors. They stuck their head in the sand over global warming. They ignored rising anxiety about stagnating middle-class incomes. They turned the war on terrorism into a defining issue and then messed it up. Mr Reagan had a lasting influence not just because he forged a coalition but also because he was right on the biggest issues of his time—the importance of shrinking government and facing down communism. The Republicans are now in danger of being either wrong or half wrong on two of the defining issues of our time—global warming and radical Islam.  The doomsters draw the wrong lesson from the Bush years. The lesson of the Bush presidency is not that the Republican coalition is exhausted but that it has been badly managed. Mr Bush has failed to keep the coalition in balance—he tilted too far towards his party's moralistic southern wing and too far away from its libertarian western wing. He has allowed public spending to balloon and pork-barrel politicians to run wild. And he has ignored big changes in public opinion about climate change. The Republican Party certainly needs to update its agenda to deal with problems Reagan never grappled with. But this is no time to go breaking the mould and starting again.

USA elections

From the candidate's viewpoint, they have a portfolio of 51 binary pay-off assets with fixed weights as determined by each state?s number of electoral votes.