The national Republican Party has been engaging in months of soul-searching about its future.

Former presidential candidate Jon Huntsman offered up a good piece of advice in a speech at the Reagan Library recently: “When a party stops solving problems, the American people move away from it. We need to get back to problem-solving.”

Massachusetts voters have a chance in the special Senate primary election to put a problem-solver on the ballot under the GOP banner. Dan Winslow has been bringing a host of bright ideas to Beacon Hill since his 2010 election to the Massachusetts House. He has won bipartisan respect and scored several successes — especially in his efforts to cut “fluff” from the state budget. His delivery of jars of marshmallow fluff to the governor’s office (one for every budget line item he would cut) got him both attention and action.

Winslow’s Senate campaign has similarly focused on good ideas with across-the-aisle appeal: A national lottery to finance $20 billion more in merit-based scholarships; attaching some “strings” to federal aid to higher education to reward colleges that keep costs down; and a plan to reform Obamacare that he calls “excel and exempt” that would allow states like Massachusetts to opt out of the federal system.

He would lower the corporate income tax as part of his plan to grow jobs and the economy and make up the lost revenue by ending some of those corporate welfare “carve-outs” won by powerful lobbying groups.

“Ideas are the means by which you change government,” Winslow said during a Herald interview.

A former district court judge, former chief legal counsel to Gov. Mitt Romney with years of private sector law practice, Winslow would be a breath of fresh air in stale old Washington.

Republicans and unenrolled voters who choose a Republican ballot on April 30 can keep Dan Winslow and those new ideas in the fight. The Herald is pleased to endorse his candidacy.