Michael R. Strain, Columnist

Republicans Need to Be More Than the Party of Trump

A policy agenda based on populist programs to help working- and middle-class voters would be a political winner. A personality cult based on grievance wouldn’t.

October 2, 2021 at 12:00 PM UTC

By Michael R. Strain

Michael R. Strain is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is director of economic policy studies and Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).”

You’ll have to do better than that.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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Republicans are apparently too busy stoking cultural grievances and recounting votes from the 2020 presidential election to craft a policy agenda for the next election. Looking forward instead of backward would be a better way to build political support and to channel the populism of former President Donald Trump into programs to help working- and middle-class voters.

The alternative for the GOP is to contest the 2024 election as a referendum on Trump’s personality and his false claims of election fraud. Republican partisans are convinced; nearly six in 10 Republicans and GOP-leaning independents state that believing the 2020 election was stolen from Trump is an important part of what it means to be a Republican, according to a recent CNN poll. And Trump’s fantasy is already a big part of the 2022 midterm elections.