Republicans who do not wish to become a fully Trumpified party could respond to these voters in two ways in the event of a Trump defeat. The first would be to hope that a big loss would destroy Trump as a political force and that nobody else would be able to mobilize his core vote as he did; then Republicans could go back to ignoring the working-class nationalists in the expectation that this group would continue to vote for the GOP over the Democrats. The risk of this path would be that the calculation might prove incorrect in the presidential race of 2020. But it would have an advantage if the core Trump vote were composed of racist idiots, as some anti-Trump Republicans believe: It would not require Republicans to take the morally dubious step of courting them (and in the process alienating other voters).

Since that view is a hostile oversimplification, however, Republicans should take a second path: Try to appeal to Trump voters on the basis of their reasonable views while rejecting the rest. Henry Olsen, writing about these voters in National Review this spring (“Trump’s Faction,” May 9), pointed out that Republicans in the past have been able to integrate the theme of national solidarity, which these voters cherish, with other conservative themes, such as individual initiative. Doing so in the future will require some policy adjustments. Doubling the number of low-skilled immigrants we accept, for example, should be off the table for Republicans. Prior to those shifts, though, should be a change in outlook. Republicans need to do a better job of keeping in mind that not all of their voters have college degrees, or care about corporate-income-tax rates, or find the example of Ronald Reagan immediately compelling.

That doesn’t mean that Republicans have to abandon everything they have ever stood for in favor of whatever Trump’s supporters want. It does mean that even in the Republican primaries, a winning conservative coalition has to be formed rather than assumed to exist.

If Trump loses, then, Republicans will not only have to devise a strategy for responding to President Clinton and healing the bitter split between Trump supporters and opponents. They will also have to stitch together an alliance from among three groups: very conservative tea partiers, voters who think along the same lines as the party establishment, and much of the core Trump vote. And then, if that weren’t enough, they must attract some voters who don’t belong to any of these groups, since they do not add up to a majority.