Resident Fellow David Frum

In the wake of yesterday's bruising result, the Republican Party faces an excruciating and divisive choice between two very different futures.

The first choice is the choice on display at the excited rallies that cheered Sarah Palin all through the fall. This is a choice to fall back on the core base of the party. The base is almost entirely white, almost entirely resident in the middle of the country, moderately affluent, middle-aged and older, more male than female, with some college education but not a college degree. Think of Joe the Plumber and you see the core of the Republican Party.

Republicans have won a string of elections thanks to Joe.

Joe came through in 1994, delivering both houses of Congress to the Republicans. Joe was not enough to elect Bob Dole president, but thanks to him the Republicans kept a dwindling hold on Congress in 1996, 1998 and 2000.

Joe rallied to President Bush after 9/11. Republicans owed their gains in 2002 to Joe. And without Joe, George W. Bush would not have won in 2004.

Joe has not changed much over the past two decades or so. But the country has. The Hispanic population of the United States has almost doubled since 1990. The proportion of white Americans with a college degree has jumped from 22 percent in 1990 to almost 28.5 percent.

To keep competitive, the GOP has had to win more and more of the Joe vote. Ruy Teixeira, perhaps America's leading expert on the voting behaviour of the white working class, observes that George W. Bush won in 2004 by only three points--but won the white working class by 23 points.

This year, an economically squeezed Joe did not come through for the GOP. But once the dust settles, many Republican leaders will urge the party to return to the tried and true. They'll say, "Two-thousand-eight was an unusual year. Iraq, Bush, Katrina, the financial meltdown and a too-moderate candidate at the head of the ticket--no wonder we lost. But the messages that won for Reagan in 1980 and Newt Gingrich in 1994 and George Bush in 2002 will win for us again. Taxes, guns, right to life, patriotism--the formula is all there. Stick to it.

"And if 60 percent of the Joe vote is no longer enough, nominate Palin--and win 65 percent. Or 70 percent. Whatever it takes."

As I said: that's one path.

There's another. It's the path that begins by facing up to the arithmetic that says Joe is no longer enough. God bless him, he's the GOP base, and no Republican wants to lose him. But he needs reinforcements.

George W. Bush tried to reinforce Joe by appealing to Hispanic voters. But that approach failed, and for predictable reasons: American Hispanics are poor--and they vote majority Democrat for the same reasons that poor people of all races vote Democratic. Bush hoped that he could win Hispanics by (1) granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, (2) expanding federal programs like Medicare and federal education aid and (3) pressuring banks to relax lending standards to help lower-income workers to buy homes.

But Bush could not get (1) through Congress (and anyway it alienated Joe, whom Republicans still needed), he did (2), but Democrats outbid him, as they always will, and as for (3), well we all know how that ended. If Hispanics benefitted disproportionately from the U.S. housing boom (as the early data suggest they did), they are suffering disproportionately from the U.S. housing bust.

There will not be an Hispanic future for the GOP for years and years.

But there is another way to reinforce Joe. A way so old and dusty as almost to feel new and unexplored.

A generation ago, Republicans dominated among college graduates. In 1984 and 1988, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush won states like California, Pennsylvania and Connecticut--states that have been "blue" for a generation.

Those days are long gone. Since 1988, Democrats have become more conservative on economics--and Republicans have become more conservative on social issues.

College-educated Americans have come to believe that their money is safe with Democrats--but that their values are under threat from Republicans. And there are more and more of these college-educated Americans all the time.

So the question for the GOP is: Will it pursue them? To do so will involve painful change, on issues ranging from the environment to abortion. And it will involve potentially even more painful changes of style and tone: toward a future that is less overtly religious, less negligent with policy and less polarizing on social issues.

That's a future that leaves little room for Sarah Palin--but it's the only hope for a Republican recovery.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.