The problem for the Republican leadership is that the House of Representatives is effectively a hung parliament. There's the far right House Freedom Caucus (~30 members), the moderate-right Tuesday group (~40 members), and the party doesn't have a majority without both groups. When John Boehner was speaker he kept the government mostly functioning by combining the moderates in the Republican party with the Democrats to pass bills to keep the lights on (continuing resolutions, debt ceiling increases, etc). But that doesn't work for major policy initiatives like health care.
The leadership drove the bill the wrong way. They should have hung the Freedom Caucus out to dry, moderated the bill, and tried to peel the necessary votes from Democrats in red states.
Torpedoing essential benefits without a more fundamentally comprehensive replacement was like strapping engines to a car and expecting it to turn into a plane.
There was no right way; the only way to win was not to play the game. Anything that destroyed the basic model of the ACA—except to move to a stronger public guarantee which basically no Republican members are interested in—was never going to attract significant Democrstic support; the initial version of the AHCA had substantial opposition from both hard-line conservatives and moderates in the Republican Party, and anything that did more to appeal to either of those groups expanded opposition on the other side.
Absolutely. The "big tent" the Republicans assembled started to come apart when the Tea Party insurgency began. They're now experiencing the consequences.
