* This article is adapted from Reihan Salam's and Ross Douthat's Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.

It was only four years ago that conservatives -- and a great many liberals -- were convinced that the Democratic party was doomed to become a purely regional institution: "a national party no more," to borrow the title of Georgia Democrat-turned-Bush supporter Zell Miller's 2003 memoir. Pundits brandished county-by-county maps showing blue enclaves drowning in a sea of red; they talked up the growth of GOP-leaning regions and constituencies and the daunting demographic gaps (God, babies) facing the Democratic party; they murmured in awe about the unbeatable political machine Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman had built. To most observers, the Republicans looked like America's natural majority, while the Democrats looked like a liberal rump, confined to the coasts and big cities, and permanently alienated from the American heartland.

Now the situation is reversed. Now it's the Democrats who expect to control the presidency and both houses of Congress come January, and perhaps for years to come. Since 2004 the GOP has lost ground on nearly every demographic and geographic front -- white collar and blue collar, Hispanic and redneck, Catholic and evangelical. The party has been routed in the Northeast, taken heavy losses in the Midwest and Mountain West, and even tasted defeat deep in the South.

Perhaps the only good news for the GOP is that it has the example of the Democratic party's rapid turnabout to ponder as it attempts to break out of its current box. True, the Republican road back probably won't be smoothed by an unpopular war, a sagging economy, and an opposition-party president with Carteresque approval ratings, as the Democrats' revival has been. Even so, there are lessons for the GOP in the Democratic party's transformation from blue-state rump to national juggernaut.

The biggest problem facing any flailing political party is its need simultaneously to accomplish two seemingly contradictory feats: re-energizing its core supporters while cutting into the other party's natural base. Over the last four years, the Democratic party has managed to do both. First a shared hatred of George W. Bush and then a shared enthusiasm for Barack Obama has made the party's base -- blacks and white, well-off, web-savvy liberals -- more excited about being Democrats than they've been since 1992, or possibly even 1964. Meanwhile, the national party has pursued an initially derided, eventually lauded "50-state strategy" aimed at rebuilding itself in solidly Republican regions as well as swing states. The result has been a slew of successful local candidates who have expanded the definition of what it means to be a Democrat, and in the process swiped votes from constituencies the GOP was supposed to own.

For Republicans, the road back to power involves pulling the same feat off in reverse. On one hand, the GOP needs to consolidate and energize its base, especially the middle-class and working-class voters in flyover states who formed the backbone of George W. Bush's majority. (This task will be made more difficult by the fact that many Republicans seem to think that "energizing the base" means appealing to a set of D.C.-based interest groups rather than actual voters.) But on the other hand, Republicans need a set of issues and candidates that can do what Democrats Travis Childers and Don Cazayoux just did in Mississippi and Louisiana, respectively -- win elections in areas that have been trending to the other party for years or decades. If the challenge for the Democrats' 50-state strategy has been to win over the vast middle-American constituency that has been termed "Sam's Club conservatives," the challenge for a Republican 50-state strategy is to win over a very different demographic: the affluent, well-educated, increasingly liberal upper middle class.

The Upper Middle Class Moves Left

There was a time when this group was the backbone of the GOP. The correlation between rising education levels and rising Republican affiliation was once a constant in American politics: Except for the LBJ landslide, managers and professionals voted for the GOP ticket in every presidential election between 1952 and 1988. Well-educated voters in that era tended to identify with business rather than with government; they valued fiscal prudence over liberal extravagance, and social stability over rapid change; and they prized a suburban way of life that seemed threatened first by creeping statism and then by the left-wing radicalism of the 1960s.

But as America changed, so did the upper middle class, growing larger and steadily more liberal. The upheavals of the 1960s produced a generation raised in affluence but steeped in a radicalism that would diminish but not disappear with age. The causes of their youth -- feminism, environmentalism, secularism, gay rights -- became the orthodoxies of their adulthood, and the result was the rise of an upper-middle-class lifestyle politics defined by its rejection of mid-century social norms and its support for the new social order that the 1960s and 1970s had ushered in.

This cultural turn dovetailed with the changing economic landscape. The women who flooded into the post-Sixties workplace, delaying marriage and childbirth for the sake of professional success, have become a key liberal constituency (in the Eisenhower era, women favored the Republicans, but no longer), as have the growing ranks of professionals who depend on an activist government for their livelihood -- social workers, trial lawyers, lobbyists, unionized teachers. More broadly, the old labor/management/government triangle of the industrial era, in which the upper middle class tended to identify with management and the free market against union bosses and government regulators, has given way to a post-industrial landscape in which the professional classes tend to identify as artists or caregivers or activists as much as entrepreneurs. This new "creative class," to swipe Richard Florida's fawning description, prides itself on trafficking not in dollars and products but in concepts and information and ideas. They define themselves against what they perceive as the crassness and sterility of corporate America, justifying their success as capitalists -- what their younger selves might have described as "selling out" -- with dollops of activism and social consciousness, and down-the-line Democratic voting.

Above all, the upper middle class has grown richer and larger and more mobile than it used to be, which in turn has insulated many of its members from the forces that used to make well-to-do voters conservative. In a sense, the post-Reagan Republican party is a victim of its own success at cutting taxes and crime and spurring economic growth -- and pushing the Democrats toward the center on all three fronts. But the GOP is also a victim of the upper middle class's success, which has made well-educated, well-off voters less sensitive to tax rates and crime rates -- and just about everything else, in fact -- than ever before, and left them free to vote their values rather than their investment portfolios.

For a long time, though, these trends have actually benefited the Republicans, who gained working-
class votes even as they slowly lost their grip on the professional class and won a majority in the process. In his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority, Kevin Phillips urged the GOP to give up on wooing what he termed "silk stocking" voters in favor of a politics that aimed "to resurrect the vitality and commitment of Middle America -- from sharecroppers and truckers to the alienated lower middle classes." To the extent that the Right followed his advice in subsequent decades, it reaped benefits at the polls, earning enough working-class votes to more than offset the leftward migration of the upper-middle-class bloc.

What was true in the Seventies and Eighties has been true in the Bush era as well. Many voters who might once have been flinty Rockefeller Republicans or pocketbook-conscious Orange County conservatives voted, reluctantly or eagerly, for Al Gore and John Kerry. But for every lost Santa Barbara suburbanite, Bush won a socially conservative white Catholic; for every ex-Republican stockbroker working on his third wife, he captured a middle-income Hispanic. In the 2004 election he lost Connecticut but won New Mexico; lost California but made inroads into the Old Northwest, taking Iowa and coming close in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The heirs of Nelson Rockefeller are trending Democratic, but Bush found a way to attract a fraction, if not a majority, of the descendants of César Chávez, Hubert Humphrey, and Robert La Follette.

Yet doing so won him barely half the vote, compared with the landslides that similar achievements won for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira call this phenomenon "George McGovern's Revenge": The upper middle class has steadily grown, along with the number of black and Latin voters, to the point where McGovern's 1972 coalition is nearly large enough to command a national majority. At the same time, the white working class has slowly shrunk. The share of adults over 25 who are non-college-educated whites has gone from over 80 percent in 1940 to under half today. So while Republicans remain broadly in line with the values of this crucial constituency, they are in the uncomfortable position of relying on ever-larger majorities of an ever-shrinking group.

In upcoming decades, then, the GOP will increasingly be in a position with the upper middle class that the Democrats have been in with the working class since the Clinton era: It's a demographic they don't need to win outright, but one in which they can't afford to get slaughtered on Election Day. Obviously there's no imaginable future in which the Republican party wins over Bobo bastions like San Francisco and Cambridge, Mass. But if the national GOP wants to win 55 percent of the vote instead of 51 percent, and to compete in 50 states -- as Nixon and Reagan did -- rather than 35, it isn't enough to reconstitute the Bush majority; it needs to be expanded as well.

Upward, Outward

So far, Republicans have pursued two main strategies to woo well-educated voters. One is simply to mimic candidates of the center-Left, offering a me-too politics that promises to combine the comforts of voting for a liberal with the frisson of being independent-minded. This might be called the Lincoln Chafee approach, after the Rhode Island senator who campaigned and legislated as a Democrat in all but name, and Chafee's fate (he was defeated for reelection in 2006) suggests the approach's limits as a political strategy: In a polarized climate, it's awfully hard to persuade liberal-leaning voters to go with the RINO when there's a real Democrat available. (This is to say nothing, obviously, of the Chafee strategy's uselessness in actually advancing conservative ideas.)

The second strategy might be called the Giuliani approach, after the former New York mayor's ill-fated 2008 presidential bid, which was supposed to make the GOP competitive again among northeastern and West Coast suburbanites by kicking away one leg of the Republican stool: doubling down on the tax-cutting and hawkishness, but losing the social conservatism. This is the strategy that has been urged on the GOP by a generation of pro-choice Republicans, from Christine Todd Whitman to Pete Wilson. But the failure of the Giuliani campaign is a reminder of why it hasn't been adopted. Yes, there are districts and regions -- such as Rudy's New York City -- where backing socially liberal candidates who are otherwise conservative makes sense for the Republican party. But any effort to rebrand the national party as neutral, indifferent, or liberal on abortion would amount to destroying the coalition in order to save it.

The broader problem with both of these approaches is their assumption that the Republican party mainly needs to subtract a set of issues in order to increase its share of the upper-middle-class vote. Obviously, blurring the differences between the two parties can be helpful -- just ask the pro-life, pro-gun Democrats who've been winning elections in the heart of Red America. But in the long term, parties don't peel away voters just by minimizing their differences with the opposition party; they peel them away by emphasizing the differences that their opponents don't want to talk about.

Consider that the GOP's best performance in recent years among voters with postgraduate degrees, the heart of the mass upper class, came in the 2002 midterms, when they backed Republican congressional candidates by 51 percent to 45 percent. Had the GOP gone wobbly on abortion or suddenly embraced gay marriage? Of course not: It was the difference between the two parties on national security, suddenly reasserting itself after a decade of abeyance, that made all the difference. Similarly, the new wave of culturally conservative Democrats have used their pro-life, pro-gun stances to neutralize attacks from the right -- but they've been winning with a neo-populist economic message that sharpens rather than elides the distinctions between Left and Right.

The challenge for Republicans is to find a set of wedge issues that will enable them to do the same thing with the upper middle class -- issues that convince proto-Bobos in Northern Virginia or suburban New Jersey that they have more in common with Sam's Club conservatism than with the silk-stocking liberalism that they're increasingly embracing. With this in mind, here are four avenues that the GOP might pursue.

School Choice for the Suburbs. The educational arms race is central to the lives of upper-middle-
class suburbanites. That's one reason President Bush championed tough standards and accountability in 2000 -- to signal that he understood that reforming education was a high priority. But No Child Left Behind was aimed at improving educational outcomes for poor children, not the vast majority of suburban kids. The real educational crisis for most suburban families is a crisis of affordability, in which home prices and tax rates in above-average school districts climb as ambitious parents struggle to give their children a leg up.

This is where conservatives usually sing the virtues of school vouchers, which decouple home prices from the quality of schools by letting money follow students according to the discretion of their parents. It's an attractive vision for the inner city, or for a tabula rasa world, but in the real world, suburban parents -- conservatives as well as liberals -- have proved resistant to vouchers. Decoupling home prices from school quality would be a great thing for young couples just starting out, but it's a potentially terrible thing for families that have already invested most of their wealth in their homes. At the same time, families who have fled the cities fear that school choice will open up their schools to children from the communities they deliberately left behind.

That's not the most generous impulse, but protectiveness of this sort isn't going to go away. To win these voters back, Republicans need to sidestep the voucher debate and instead emphasize real local control of schools. Conventional, union-dominated public schools have to abide by spending formulas and staffing ratios set by a central board of education. Local management -- that is, the principal who knows the situation close at hand -- has relatively little discretion. This is the great advantage of charter schools, which allow principals to be innovative and entrepreneurial, allocating funds and making hiring decisions to address the needs of parents and children, rather than to satisfy the dictates of the bureaucracy.

It's no surprise that administrators in conventional public schools are annoyed by the attention lavished on charters. If they had the same freedom, they argue, they could match or exceed charter-school results. So why not give it to them? Instead of slowly expanding the number of public charter schools, why not offer the same spending discretion to every public school in a district? In the areas we're discussing, many districts contain multiple schools at each grade level, so the potential for competition is great.

The approach, called the weighted-student formula, is simple: The more students a public school attracts, the more public money it gets -- and that money is spent at the discretion of the principal, not unions and bureaucrats. To attract students, schools within a district have to differentiate themselves and deliver results. And they have to be accountable, since centralized spending decisions -- always fat targets for self-dealing -- would give way to transparent spending decisions made at the local level.

At present, the weighted-student formula is being championed by reformist liberals in one-party cities like San Francisco and New York. But only Republicans can take the idea nationwide, since it threatens to divide and weaken the teachers' unions, on which the national Democratic party has come to depend. It's a cause that could make mince-meat of the Left's claim to represent the interests of children. And by leaving district boundaries and funding more or less intact for purposes of administrative convenience while encouraging experimentation within each district, the weighted-student formula would allay suburbanites' fears about seeing their kids bused into unsafe schools while delivering many of the benefits of a voucher program.

The Greening of Conservatism. For the moment, Democrats own the environment as an issue, in large part because Republicans have conceded it to them. That needs to change. For many upper-middle-class voters, the environment is as much a values issue as abortion is to social conservatives. And as the consensus surrounding the role of human-produced carbon emissions in climate change has grown stronger, conservatives have often taken a head-in-the-sand approach, which in turn has fit neatly into a larger left-wing narrative of a know-nothing, anti-science Right -- a narrative that has become one of the many drags on the GOP's ability to woo professionals.

John McCain deserves credit for recognizing these realities. Unfortunately, with his support for cap-and-trade, he's pulled a Chafee on the issue, copying Democratic proposals rather than advancing a conservative alternative. By aping liberalism's call for a regulatory approach to climate change, the McCain approach allows Democrats to continue to pose as visionaries on the issue, rather than exposing them for what they are: top-down statists who are imposing a distaste for industrial society and the suburban lifestyle on what is fundamentally a question of problem-solving. (More encouraging is McCain's proposal to build 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030.)

By debating liberals on the best approach for fighting climate change, conservatives can make the case for an environmentalism that is pro-growth and pro-jobs. One approach, advanced in these pages by Jim Manzi and elsewhere by reformist liberals Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, is to eschew punitive approaches like carbon taxes or a cap-and-trade system -- which would be a messier and more complex form of carbon taxes -- and instead embrace large investments in alternative technologies. For instance, conservatives could propose an agency dedicated to funding alternative-energy research -- modeled, perhaps, on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has sparked dramatic advances in the realm of defense technology. Here, too, McCain has a good idea with his proposal of a $300 million prize for the inventor of an improved automobile battery. The threat posed by global warming is real, the Right should argue, but massive new regulatory burdens will undercut the growth and innovation we need to build lasting and effective solutions. That message -- that we should innovate, rather than regulate, our way out of our energy dilemma -- will resonate with upper-middle-class voters, particularly when they understand how the costs of cap-and-trade will impact their lives.

The Politics of Commuting. An innovation-driven approach to fighting climate change would also enable conservatives to define themselves as the champions of the suburban lifestyle, against a liberalism that seeks to dramatically raise the costs of gas and homeownership. Whether you're talking about Phoenix or Atlanta or Chicago or Philadelphia, suburban families share at least two interests: They want enough elbow room to raise their families, and they want to keep traffic moving. The modern commute is a sleeper issue that a pro-family, pro-suburb party ought to exploit.

As Nicholas Kulish of the New York Times has pointed out, 25 years ago the average American spent just 16 hours annually sitting in traffic; by 2003, the figure was up to 47 hours, at a cost of $63.1 billion (and 2.3 billion extra gallons of gasoline burned) per annum. America's highway infrastructure simply hasn't been modernized enough to keep up with population growth. Vehicle-lane miles (a measure of how much use highways are getting) have increased by nearly 150 percent since the 1970s, but America has added just 5 percent in highway capacity, putting an immense strain on commuters' schedules, pocketbooks, and tempers. Naturally, the problem is likely to get worse. In The Road More Traveled, their manifesto for an improved transportation policy, Ted Balaker and Sam Staley estimate that traffic delays will increase by another 65 percent over the next quarter century.

Liberals generally insist that the traffic problem can be alleviated only with mass transit, because building more highways "induces demand" and leaves the roads just as congested as before. But as Balaker and Staley note, increasing pavement reliably reduces commuting delays: Dallas has twice as much pavement per person as Los Angeles, and (surprise!) half the congestion. And more lanes are just the beginning of the sort of solutions Republicans should support: Private-public partnerships, in which toll highways are administered by companies with an interest in maximizing movement through their toll booths, can provide needed funds for infrastructure; traffic-signal patterns can be optimized and freeway ramps monitored to keep the flow of traffic steady throughout a commute; and differential pricing on lanes and highways can reduce congestion by drawing more commuters into off-peak hours. (Sometimes new tolls would have to be imposed to pay for the construction, but the benefits would be well worth the cost. The point is to establish Republicans as pro-car and pro-road.)

This last solution will require a shift toward flexible work schedules, but this is already happening in many industries, and it brings us to another potential conservative response to the commuting crunch: public investments in telecommuting infrastructure. Telecommuting is one of the great boons of the Internet age, and 44 million Americans already telecommute part-time. Working long-distance promises not only to shore up the suburban way of life -- by enabling parents to live in cheaper areas and spend more time with their children -- but to reduce our economy's environmental footprint.

Moreover, a new national-infrastructure strategy would dovetail with the conservative crusade against earmarks. As Kulish points out: "Because there is no national vision of how money should be spent to upgrade America's physical plant, the money that is allocated for it is being spent piecemeal on dubious projects." The "Bridge to Nowhere" isn't just a waste of money, Republicans should tell suburbanites -- it's the reason you have to sit in traffic an extra 20 minutes every day.

Defusing the Crime Bomb. The GOP's appeals to law and order in the face of the post-Sixties crime wave were crucial to building the Reagan majority, and the declining importance of the crime issue, in turn, has been crucial to upper-middle-class voters' leftward swing. But crime, like commuting, is a sleeper issue for the GOP. It still matters to suburban voters, as evidenced by everything from the national panic over sex offenders to the rising fears of immigrant gangs in states like California and Virginia. The trouble is that the long-running conservative answer to the crime problem -- tough sentencing and mass incarceration -- while successful, has reached a point of diminishing returns.

Indeed, the unintended consequences of this draconian approach may be on the verge of spurring a new crime wave. Huge numbers of prisoners who have been locked up since the 1980s, when tough sentencing spread nationwide, will be released from prison over the next decade. Most of these men were arrested early in life, and most have had very little in the way of education. And the opportunities for illicit activity are likely to increase just as this generation is hitting the streets. The imported drugs that landed many of these men in prison in the first place are being replaced by homegrown drugs that are virtually impossible to interdict.

A similar cocktail of demographic change and criminal opportunity led to a crisis of authority in the 1970s. A new crime wave, particularly one linked to Hispanic immigration and black recidivism, could set us back by decades and lead to renewed racial tension and resentment. And as gang violence spreads beyond the inner cities -- something that's already happening in many regions, as programs designed to break up pockets of concentrated poverty disperse lawbreakers into the suburbs -- voters living in the inner suburbs will find themselves on the front lines. Already voter anxiety is rising: The percentage of Americans who told the General Social Survey that they are "afraid to walk in their neighborhood at night" rose five percentage points between 2004 and 2006, after declining every year since 1994.

Instead of waiting for a crime explosion, conservatives should find policies to prevent it. And the best prevention is simply having more cops on the beat. It wasn't just prisons that brought the last crime wave to a halt in the 1990s. It was also the dramatic increase in the size of police forces, whose per capita numbers rose by 10 percent between 1994 and 1999, with sharper increases in the biggest cities. We're still a long way from having a law-enforcement glut: According to an estimate by economist John Donohue, the United States would need to hire 500,000 more police officers before reaching the point of diminishing returns. To put that number in context, there are only 665,000 police officers in the United States at present.

Moreover, a shift to a policing-first strategy would enable the national GOP to follow the lead of figures like Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas and advocate prison reform as well as prevention. In the struggle to win upper-middle-class votes, this two-pronged approach could offer Republicans the best of both worlds: They'd be asking suburbanites to vote their fears and their consciences at once.

Outside the Box

What all of these proposals have in common is the capacity to divide the upper middle class against itself, pitting rich liberals who are insulated from the costs of voting Democratic -- longer commutes and higher gas prices, uncompetitive schools and higher crime rates -- against upwardly mobile centrists who aren't. None of these ideas are likely to turn the suburbs of New York or Los Angeles dark red anytime soon. But they might just help the GOP break out of its current regional and demographic box and become a national party again.