Nice Conservative Blueprint, Who’s Gonna Build It?

As of about 5:00pm on Election Day, one could still find pundits opining that the Republican Party would have done better nominating Ambassador Nikki Haley, who would surely have held together the GOP coalition more effectively than Donald Trump, appealed more to women, and so on. The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg tweeted proudly that he had written in Paul Ryan, the former Speaker of the House best known for a tax cut that added nearly $2 trillion to federal deficits and his subsequent work launching SPACs and promoting cryptocurrency. The future direction of American conservatism seemed likely to face sharp contestation in the coming years.

By midnight, all that was over. Trump was going to win the popular vote, the first time a Republican had done so in twenty years. He was going to win more electoral college votes than any Republican since 1988. And while narrow victories in every single one of the swing states would hand him the presidency, the massive shifts among young and non-white voters and accompanying double-digit gains in urban areas were the story with the longer-term implications. Democratic strongholds appear headed toward swing-state status: Virginia, Minnesota, and New Jersey all had margins below six points. After years of Democrats talking about “turning Texas blue,” Republicans are now closer to turning Illinois and New York red.

The path for conservatives to a durable governing majority runs forward from here, toward solidifying and expanding this multi-ethnic, working-class coalition. Will a serious Old Right candidate even bother running for president on a free-trade, open-borders, anti-worker agenda in 2028? Perhaps. Certainly there will be no shortage of wealthy donors eager to set their money on fire supporting the effort, no shortage of commentators who have dedicated their careers to market fundamentalism who will cheer along. But as a political matter, such campaigning is dead on arrival. The relevant question for the next several years is how to deliver for the ordinary Americans who swung this year’s election and create a political movement, message, and agenda capable of building on that success.

Understanding America is a publication of American Compass, the organization that has served since its founding in 2020 as the flagship for this exact project. Frankly, it’s a bit eerie to watch the issues we have championed—decoupling from China, tariffs to reverse globalization’s harms, restricting low-wage immigration, industrial policy to rebuild American manufacturing, a conservative embrace of labor, a generous benefit for working families—become the central debates in our politics, with our small but mighty team recognized as the leaders on each and every one.