Ted Cruz's plan for winning the nomination could work. But it won't work in the general.

Which brings us up to the fatal conceit of the Cruz campaign, one which is shared, sadly, not just in his camp: That the GOP’s only problem winning national elections is tactics and strategy.

The main takeaway of the 2012 defeat among Republicans was that Romney was a bad candidate with a bad operation. But in many states, including purple states, Romney ran ahead of the generic Republican.

No, the problem the Republican Party has in winning national elections is that voters aren’t buying what it’s selling. They’re not buying what it’s selling because what it’s selling is out of date; I mean this not in a progressive “right side of history” way, but matter-of-factly. Inflation, crime, welfare reform, high tax rates — these are the concerns of the middle class of 1980. And these are no longer its concerns because Republicans fixed many of them.

Today, middle class worries are about employment, education, health care, job security and stagnating incomes — and the current Republican agenda doesn’t have answers to those issues. The GOP still has a chance: Voters aren’t buying what they’re selling, but they’re only buying the Democrat brand by default. Voters reelected Obama not because they liked ObamaCare — they didn’t — but because Mitt Romney’s alternative was a great big deafening silence.