Though it will take some time to sort through the results of the midterm elections, it seems as though Republicans fared particularly poorly among college-educated voters, especially in densely populated cities and suburbs, while losing ground among blue-collar voters in the Rust Belt, a region where Trump fared notably well in 2016 relative to earlier GOP presidential candidates. Ideally, Republicans would want to win back both constituencies, whom the political analyst Henry Olsen, writing in National Review, refers to as rinos, or Republicans in Name Only, and tigrs, or Trump Is Great Republicans. Whereas rinos dissent from movement conservatism in their relative social liberalism, tigrs, according to Olsen, “strongly disagree with movement conservatism on business tax cuts, entitlement cuts, and many social issues.”

Trump wooed the tigrs in 2016 by insisting that he was a different kind of Republican. He styled himself as almost post-ideological, reminding his GOP critics not to forget that “this is called the Republican Party, it’s not called the Conservative Party.” Indeed, he explicitly rejected a number of conservative ideological nostrums, including hostility to the safety net, while emphasizing that on the issues of immigration and trade, defending the national interest would be his lodestar. Some rinos reconciled themselves to Trump’s 2016 synthesis, which stressed economic nationalism while deemphasizing movement conservatism’s emphasis on market freedom, while others did not, in part out of revulsion at his rhetorical excesses. But Trump won enough of them to narrowly win the presidency.