Robichaud: GOP’s growth comes by cultivating the grass roots

When the GOP lost the last two presidential campaigns, there was much discussion about Republicans having to rebrand in order to win.

Many establishment types thought we should be Democrat-lite. In other words, they wanted a party of cheap liberals who support more regulations on businesses, the liberal social agenda and tax cuts.

The GOP grass roots had a different vision. As I have preached, the Republican Party needed to become the party of the working class.

Who would have thought that a billionaire businessman would prove the grass roots correct?

It’s time for the Massachusetts GOP to embrace this branding.

In 2010, Scott Brown in his barn jacket captured this working-class positioning. Unfortunately, he ran for re-election in a presidential year when there was a super turnout of Democrats, and he angered the base by voting for Dodd-Frank. Brown once again embraced the working class by being an early endorser of Trump.

In 2014, Republican conservatives, myself included, ran a successful grass roots effort to repeal automatic gas tax hikes. This statewide ballot referendum forced Martha Coakley to answer the question — how much the gas tax cost. She failed miserably, proving how out of touch she was with the working class. Candidate Charlie Baker embraced this repeal effort, but Gov. Baker failed to understand this positioning in 2016.

While I wholeheartedly agree with the ballot question to expand charter schools, was that the correct question to embrace or could team Baker have developed a ballot question to reach out to more blue-collar workers? At the end of the day, Question 2 was perceived as stealing money out of public schools, hurting the middle class kids, which did not grow the GOP brand.

Despite Baker’s good work to straighten out the messes left behind by former Gov. Deval Patrick, Baker is now vulnerable. Not only did he lose on Questions 2 and 4, but he refused to vote for Donald Trump.

Two weeks ago, Trump received more than a million Massachusetts votes — 39,000 more votes than Baker earned for governor. I’m sure his advisers are saying those Trump votes have no place else to go, so he can count on them.

Baker needs to reach out to working-class Trump voters. His first step should be to replace state GOP chairwoman Kirsten Hughes, no fan of Trump, with Steve Aylward, who backed Trump and led the repeal of automatic gas tax hikes.