1) The GOP-E in 2010, by their continual efforts to backstab Tea Party candidates that defeated RINOs in the primary, showed that to them, party unity only applies when the RINO wins.
2) Romney used a scorched-earth approach against other candidates in the GOP primary that makes it exceedingly difficult to reconcile after the primaries have been concluded.
3) Romney is a very bad candidate to woo independents, as he takes Obamacare, bailouts and Wall Street cronyism largely off the table as election issues against Obama, and he is simply not an appealing candidate to them in the general.
4) Romney is an even worse candidate for rallying the base, given his past liberal positions and his well-documented propensity for changing his views to suit the next election. How can conservatives believe a thing he says now, especially after the Etch-A-Sketch comment by one of his key advisors?
5) Romney's only advantage in the GOP primary was money to pound the political life out of his opponents. He will not have that advantage in the general. And he has already provided the Obama campaign and the DNC with an autumn's worth of sound bites to use against him.
6) Romney simply is not a likeable candidate and the only reason he appears to be running is to feed his own ego.
7) A case can also be made, given the fact that G.W. Bush didn't veto a spending bill sent to him by a GOP Congress, that a GOP Congress would not stand up to Romney's liberalism the way they have with Obama's.
That's a lot of strikes. For those demanding that skeptical conservatives fall in line, realize that the temptation is very strong to tell the GOP-E to stuff their calls for party unity where it don't shine, given what happened in 2010. That Romney and the GOP-E are the ones who largely created the divide we see today, and I have seen no sign that they are aware of their own culpability, the first step to bridging that divide - to the contrary, they seem driven to rub conservative's noses in the fact that Romney won. And that there is a strong perception that Romney is doomed to failure, and that efforts should instead be put into electing more conservatives for Congress and state and local races.
So the usual calls for party unity after the RINO wins just ain't gonna cut it this time. Running against Obama won't be enough, either. You have a very hard sell with Romney. The usual sales pitches from previous campaigns just won't cut it.
You know, if every conservative who whined about how they don’t like Romney, but they “have” to vote for him to “stop Obama” would get together and unite behind an actual conservative third party candidate, there’d be a good shot at beating both Romney and Obama.
Conservatives make up a plurality in this country. There are a lot of disaffected independents who don’t like either party. There are conservative Democrats who are disaffected with their Party’s guy, and for whom Romney won’t be a big draw. That’s fertile ground for a credible third party run with a decent candidate.
The only thing keeping conservatives from having this option are the spineless, GOP-institutionalised folks who can’t see out of their little boxes.