I divide the Conservative base into Social, Libertarian, and Fiscal camps, of course a lot of us have a foot in more than one, or even connect to all three. I would add foreign-policy hawks, but there are some dyed-in-the-wool Social Liberals like Lieberman who are also foreign policy hawks.
The old-line socially-Liberal GOP establishment which supports Steele and starting the GOP bargaining position in the middle, so they can end up halfway to the far left when negotiations end, are the 100% Fiscal Conservatives. They have no interest whatsoever in Social Conservative values like right-to-life, or Conservative individual liberty issues (As opposed to corporate or business ones) such as RKBA or the trend of eminent domain law. In fact, they seem to be ashamed to be associated with anyone taking a strong stand on social or Constitutional issues.
That's my problem with Steele. He connects with one of the three components of the base, and exudes disdain or fear of embarassment about the crazy relative for the other two. The fiscal camp does offer a fairly concentrated amount of wealth to support campaigns, but also the smallest amount of actual votes on election day and their contempt or indifference for the values of the other two camps is a strong encouragement for them to stay home.
McCain 2008 for instance was mostly a Fiscal Conservative (With some redeeming qualities as a foreign policy hawk) but historically had put all the distance he could afford to between himself and the other two camps. Only having Palin on the ticket with him got him anywhere north of 40%, because without her, a Hell of a lot of Social and Libertarian Conservatives would have just said '**** it, game over' and stayed home in November 2008. He has put on a great show of changing his spots since then, which I personally don't buy since he has his pompous airhead daughter out flacking for the 'Wink, wink, not really' proposition, and attacking the Social Conservatives (Especially Palin) to build that meme.