All joking aside, I don't think conservative candidates would get a fair shake, but only because their ideas are so far divorced from what younger Americans think of as values.
Younger Americans ("Millennials") who have been through the crucible of the latest economic recession are going to be proponents of a strong social safety net, while older voters who lived through the most prosperous of American times will simply say "Bootstraps!" (even though those very same 65+ voters are the ones who will extract more from social security than they've contributed, owning to longer life expectancies and the current biomedical revolution).
Younger Americans are more likely to vote in favor of policies supporting same sex marriage and the legalization of Marijuana (neither which infringe on the rights of others, may I add). I know older Americans who are still opposed to interracial marriage.
I don't have time at the moment to continue with examples, but as I mentioned above, I think conservative candidates would get skewered in a forum where you can't outright lie, as you'll be fact checked immediately through publicly available data sources.
"Gallup: Americans Continue to Shift Left on Key Moral Issues" http://www.gallup.com/poll/183413/americans-continue-shift-l...
"Americans are more likely now than in the early 2000s to find a variety of behaviors morally acceptable, including gay and lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage and sex between an unmarried man and woman. Moral acceptability of many of these issues is now at a record-high level."
"Moral acceptance of divorce and stem cell research has also jumped by 12 points, reaching 71 percent and 64 percent respectively. By slightly lesser margins, Americans have also grown more accepting of issues such as polygamy and cloning humans. Still, these issues are seen as morally acceptable by less than one-sixth of the population."
"Americans are becoming more liberal on social issues, as evidenced not only by the uptick in the percentage describing themselves as socially liberal, but also by their increasing willingness to say that a number of previously frowned-upon behaviors are morally acceptable. The biggest leftward shift over the past 14 years has been in attitudes toward gay and lesbian relations, from only a minority of Americans finding it morally acceptable to a clear majority finding it acceptable."