This reversal means the GOP has to think more seriously about the economic needs of working-class voters as those voters perceive them. If these people were convinced that supply-side, employer-focused economics worked in their interest, they would have been voting Republican for decades. The fact that it took Trump’s bombastic embrace of immigration limitation and opposition to untrammeled free trade to bring them into the Republican fold shows that the party needs something more than the same old messages to maintain — and grow — its coalition. And that means thinking seriously about unions. Unions exist to solve problems. People only join them when they think they aren’t getting what they deserve from their employer, whether it is higher wages or benefits, greater job security or better working conditions. Take away that feeling of injustice, and people won’t join unions. Smart employers used to know this and gave their employees better wages and benefits packages than perhaps they needed to offer. My father’s old company, Hewlett-Packard, famously had a “no layoff” policy that meant business downturns were shared by all rather than by shedding a few. A Republican policy toward the working-class voters’ fears could push business to re-adopt these wiser policies in place of the efficient but ruthless “shareholder capitalism” model that has come to be the norm... This gives reform-minded Republicans a huge opening to meet the real needs of workers without embracing union bosses. They can push for tighter labor markets at home by eliminating illegal immigration and restricting legal immigration. They can change the incentives that push corporations to invest in other countries’ labor forces, which will inevitably mean tariffs or higher taxes on profits from goods designed here but produced elsewhere. They can redesign the safety net to subsidize people who move for job opportunities and adopt a mild industrial policy to push economic development toward depressed regions with skilled workers. They can even embrace innovative alternatives to traditional unions of the sort that American Compass’s Oren Cass has promoted.