Where are we going?   After our loss on Tuesday, is the GOP going to water down its message and cave in to the pressure of transforming into a more "inclusive" party?  I personally hope that's not the case.

People and pundits from both parties seem to have come to the conclusion that the GOP is just outdated and needs to catch up with the times.  However, they're missing a key part of conservatism: ‘Our message is timeless.’  It lasted from the Revolution in the eighteenth century up to today; and it hasn't changed.  The root of what we are fighting for has remained the same since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  The ways we spread the message and specific causes we fight for may change over time, but the heart of the message is still the one the founders had in 1776.

The GOP needs to come up with serious ways to conduct better outreaches to voters; specifically Hispanic and young voters.  The Republican Party is not anti-immigration; we're simply anti-illegal immigration and want the legal way of attaining citizenship to be prominent again.  There's nothing wrong with immigrants coming to America as they have for centuries as long as they go through the legal process of acquiring citizenship.  Don't let the Left paint us as the anti-immigrant party, because we're far from that.  If anything, liberals are exactly what they accuse us of being.  By hurting the businesses that would hire new citizens, Democrats are, if one exists, the anti-immigrant party.  The marketing is key; if immigrants believe that we want them to self-deport back to their home countries, can you blame them for voting against us?  This is hardly the ideal of the Republican Party; instead, this has become the accepted narrative for many in the mainstream media when describing conservative immigration policy.  We have to fight back if we want to win the Hispanic vote.

I'm proud to be a young conservative, but it was frustrating for me to watch this election season as the GOP did the bare minimum when reaching out to young voters.  Reaching out doesn't automatically mean pandering; there’s nothing wrong with conveying the conservative message to young people in ways they can relate and respond to. 

The Left is feeding young people with the idea that taking money from the rich and giving it to them is a noble way of life; they're not being told that once that money is gone, the government will hang them out to dry.  Eventually, when you run out of other people's money, you realize that your ‘free lunches’ were never free in the first place.  Young people are hungry for a message of true hope and change; however, they're comfortable sticking with the old and familiar version as long as the GOP fails to give them a reason to do otherwise.  It's time for the GOP to update not the core of its message, but how it portrays that message to coming generations.

We don't need to transform the conservative message.  We need to instead come up with strong proposals on key issues and show people that we know what we're doing.  This isn't something a bunch of white-haired old men came up with on a whim; this has been hundreds of years in the making.  If we give in and make our message more ‘inclusive,’ we'll end up losing many of the activists we already have and not gain many more in exchange.  

Don't change the message before my generation has its chance to spread it; we want our chance.  We won't disappoint.  However, we need the core of conservatism to stay true to its roots; otherwise, we'll be left with nothing but the broken pieces of a once strong movement that since has fallen apart.  Our problem isn't inclusiveness: our problem is the marketing of our message.  Let's determine the best way to spread it and jump right back into the fight.