I stirred up some controversy last week when I told a conference of several dozen House Republicans that the GOP is now officially a Trump working class party. For better or worse, I said at the gathering inside the Capital Dome, the baton has now officially been passed from the Reagan era to the new Trump era. The members didn’t quite faint over my apostasy, but the shock was palpable.
I emphasized that Republicans must prioritize delivering jobs and economic development to the regions of the country like the industrial Midwest — states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa and Missouri. These are places that for the most part never felt the meager Obama recovery and where blue collar Reagan Democrats took a leap of faith and came back to the Republican Party for the first time since 1984. The GOP will be judged in 2018 and 2020 as to whether they deliver results for this part of the country and for the forgotten middle class men and women (“the deplorables”) who Democrats abandoned economically and culturally. This is all simply a political truism.
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