Illustration by Nishant Choksi

One recent morning at the Jefferson Hotel, in Washington, D.C., Peter Wehner, a conservative writer who served as an adviser for the past three Republican Presidents, described his party’s problems over a bowl of oatmeal. He said, “We got clobbered in 2012”—the fifth Presidential election out of the past six in which the Republican candidate lost the popular vote. “There’s a demographic problem. White votes are going down two points every year. We’re out of touch with the middle class.” Mitt Romney—whose very hair embodies wealthy privilege—was nominated at a national convention, in Tampa, that became an Ayn Rand-style celebration of business executives, the heroic “makers.” During the campaign, Romney wrote off forty-seven per cent of the country—the “takers”—as government parasites. He went on to lose badly to President Barack Obama, whom Republicans had regarded as an obvious failure, a target as vulnerable as Jimmy Carter. In the shock of that defeat, Wehner said, some conservatives realized that “there was a need for a policy agenda that reaches the middle class.” He added, “This was not a blinding insight.”

A generation ago, Democrats lost five of six Presidential elections; in 1992, Bill Clinton, calling himself a New Democrat, ended the streak. Clinton didn’t repudiate the whole Democratic platform—government activism on behalf of ordinary Americans remained the Party’s core idea—but he adopted positions on issues like crime and welfare that were more closely aligned with the views of the majority, including some rank-and-file Democrats. The message, Wehner said, was as much symbolic as substantive: “ ‘We’re not a radical party; we’ve sanded off our rougher edges, and you can trust me.’ ” He went on, “The hope for some of us was that our candidate in 2016 would be the Republican version of Clinton”—a conservative reformer who, having learned from past defeats, championed economic policies that placed Republicans on the side of the hard-pressed, including non-white Americans, the soon-to-be majority.

For fresh ideas, such a candidate had only to turn to a group of Republican thinkers who call themselves “reformocons,” of whom Wehner is a leader. Last year, the reformocons published a pamphlet of policy proposals called “Room to Grow,” on health care, education, taxes, entitlements, and other topics. In an introduction, Wehner writes, “Americans do not have a sense that conservatives offer them a better shot at success and security than liberals. For that to change, conservatives in American politics need to understand constituents’ concerns, speak to those aspirations and worries, and help people see how applying conservative principles and deploying conservative policies could help make their lives better.”

The essays don’t upend Republican orthodoxy. They argue that government should intervene on behalf of poor and middle-income Americans, but in ways that apply market principles to public policy, taking power away from Washington and giving individuals more options. Some proposals are familiar: school choice, health-care savings accounts. Others are more daring—for example, having college education underwritten by private investors, then repaid over the next decade as a predetermined percentage of graduates’ earnings. A few ideas, such as a wage subsidy that would increase the pay of workers making less than forty thousand dollars a year, building on the Earned Income Tax Credit, could easily garner bipartisan support.

“Room to Grow” contains a striking description of the American economic landscape: children born into poverty with little chance of escaping it, and middle-class families overwhelmed by the rising costs of health care and education while their incomes stay flat. It’s not that different from the story that Elizabeth Warren, the liberal Massachusetts senator, tells. After years of ignoring these stark realities—or of blaming big government, in the spirit of Ronald Reagan—some Republicans have begun to sound more like Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt.

The reformocon project shows how extreme mainstream conservatism has become in its opposition to anything involving the state. The reformocons court right-wing censure simply by acknowledging that the middle class is under pressure, and that government has a role to play beyond cutting taxes. The reckless, and ultimately doomed, shutdown of the federal government by congressional Republicans, in October, 2013, precipitated the first conference of reformocons, in Middleburg, Virginia, and that led to “Room to Grow.”

When the 2016 Presidential campaign began, an organizer of the conference, April Ponnuru, became a policy adviser to Jeb Bush. Governor John Kasich, of Ohio, read an essay by Wehner and Michael Gerson, a speechwriter in the Bush White House, titled “A Conservative Vision of Government,” and expressed approval to an aide. Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, sought policy advice from several reformocons, including Yuval Levin, who, as editor of the quarterly National Affairs, is the group’s foremost intellectual. Earlier this year, Rubio published a book, “American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone,” interwoven with the personal stories of struggling Floridians. Most of the policy ideas came directly from “Room to Grow,” a debt that Rubio acknowledged effusively.

To the reformocons, the Republican Presidential race appeared to be stocked with candidates who were eager to take the Party into the twenty-first century. “I thought it was a group of people who would make that case,” Wehner said. He looked up from his oatmeal with a wan smile. “But then came Mr. Trump.”

Donald Trump’s campaign first attracted attention, in the press and among Republican voters, when he disparaged Mexican immigrants. Since he entered the race, in June, slurs and feuds have been the mainstay of his media image. Less widely discussed are his positions on working- and middle-class concerns like trade, taxes, and entitlements. In his scattershot, get-out-of-my-way fashion, Trump has vowed to rewrite trade deals involving China, impose tariffs on the products of American companies that send manufacturing overseas, leave Social Security and Medicare alone, and raise taxes on hedge-fund managers. (“I want to save the middle class. The hedge-fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”) To the reformocons’ dismay, Trump has commandeered their target audience and tainted their high-minded proposals.

Trump’s popularity isn’t based on ideology. According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, he draws about evenly from Republicans who consider themselves “moderate to liberal,” “somewhat conservative,” and “very conservative.” More than anything, Trump supporters are defined by class: non-college-educated whites favor him at twice the rate of those with college degrees. Trump is attracting the very blue-collar Americans whom the reformocons were aiming to bind to the Republican Party. So far, at least, these voters, many of them angry and alienated, aren’t listening to the “Room to Grow” crowd. They’re thrilling to madder music.

Working-class whites remain the most coveted demographic in American politics, even as they shrink as a percentage of the electorate. Ever since Ronald Reagan became President, Democrats have worried about their declining share of this vote. In 2012, Obama captured just thirty-six per cent of white voters without college degrees, down three per cent from 2008—partly owing to the unpopularity of the Affordable Care Act, and skewed by Obama’s abysmal numbers among white Southerners. The emergence of the reformocons shows that more thoughtful Republicans have also grown concerned about the allegiance of the Party’s presumed base.

Last year, a Gallup poll found that forty-five per cent of Republicans think that the rich should pay more in taxes. Another poll, by the Pew Research Center, showed that more Republicans favor increased spending on Social Security, Medicare, education, and infrastructure than favor cutting those programs. Although government activism is anathema to conservative donors and Grover Norquist, it’s fine with a lot of Republicans making less than fifty thousand dollars a year. April Ponnuru’s husband, Ramesh, a contributor to “Room to Grow” and a senior editor at National Review, said, “Trump shows that Republican voters are not especially dogmatic conservatives—not as much as I’d like them to be.”