“In the immediate aftermath of defeat, there’s a temptation to take comfort in pleasing illusions,” Ramesh Ponnuru told me this past March, over filet mignon at the Palm, the Dupont Circle steakhouse. He was recalling the shock that conservatives felt after Obama’s first victory. If Levin is the reformers’ big thinker, then Ponnuru, who entered Princeton just after his 17th birthday and graduated summa cum laude (in history), is its cold-eyed political realist. “The Republican ranks were full of people up and down the line,” he said, “from the average voter to sophisticated operatives, that were of the view that if we’d just been a little more pure in the Bush years, none of this would have happened, and the path to power is just to purify ourselves.”

This was understandable. The “big government” conservatism of the Bush administration alienated many on the right. There was a libertarian reaction, and it set the Tea Party aboil and helped the G.O.P. triumph in 2010. But that victory reflected the passions of only a portion of the electorate, much of it restricted to the South and the Plains states, and it also sent up a wave of fringe candidates who cost Republicans control of the Senate.

Nevertheless, the appetite for ideological purity seemed insatiable and overrode all other considerations. Even cooler heads were persuaded that Mitt Romney would coast to victory as long as he could convince the activist wing of the party that he was a true conservative. “The result of the 2012 election was more disorienting than the ’08 election,” Ponnuru said. He described his futile attempt to educate House members at their annual retreat in January 2013, when Ponnuru worked through data showing that the loss couldn’t be pinned on Romney alone. “As much as people say Romney was a weak candidate, he ran ahead of Senate candidates in almost every state” — a crucial point that Ponnuru mentioned to the Republican caucus. “I would have expected these guys, being political professionals, to know that,” he said. “They didn’t know it. They knew that Romney lost, and they knew that they won, and that was about all they knew.”

In fact, some in Washington did know better. One was John Murray, Eric Cantor’s deputy chief of staff. “There’s a lot of inertia on Capitol Hill,” Murray told me last month. Debt reform and tax reform “were taking up a lot of oxygen” — and crowding out many other issues that most voters were worried about: rising health care costs, exorbitant college-tuition expenses, jobs that didn’t pay enough. “I was frustrated, because I wanted us to be more offensively postured around issues like how to help the middle class.”

In October 2011, Murray formed an advocacy group called YG Network — YG as in Young Guns, the tag adopted by Cantor and two other stars in the Republican House, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy. Since it was formed as a nonprofit, YG Network operated independently of the politicians from whom it took its name. Murray envisioned it as a kind of processing plant for policies that could be pitched toward middle-class voters. A self-described “money guy,” he raised more than $12 million for the cause in 2012. The next year, he commissioned polls and focus groups with middle-class voters in four midsize cities. Researchers sorted respondents into two groups of around a dozen people. One group consisted of self-identified Tea Party supporters, the other of moderate swing voters. What was interesting to Murray was that, aside from a few hot-button ideological issues, the two groups sounded alike. Their paramount concerns were nagging “kitchen-table-centric” issues. In Murray’s paraphrase: “Fuel prices are up. Grocery bills are up. The kids are home now, but who’s going to help us get them to college?” The respondents were not Obama fans, but they also felt as if the Republicans weren’t helping them, either.

Murray was aware of the various reform proposals being published in National Affairs and elsewhere, but, he said, “there’s a difference between how an academic and policy wonk approaches the discussion and how a political-communication person does it.” To help sell these ideas more widely, he turned to April Ponnuru, Ramesh’s wife, who was working as a senior policy adviser to Senator Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican. In December 2013, Ponnuru left her job on the Hill to become YG Network’s policy director. “It’s the only game in town,” she told me. “Most of the other activities have been negative and destructive.” She, too, talked at length about how the party was out of touch. “The biggest problem is that the politicians don’t represent the people. We’re identified with the rich and big business,” she said, ticking off a list of constituencies that Republicans have alienated: “Single women, Hispanics, young people.” Also as a wife and mother, she had serious doubts about any movement “that can offer nothing to a married woman with three children at the bottom half” of the economic heap.

Ponnuru’s first step was to organize a brainstorming session with her husband, Levin and Peter Wehner (who, like Levin, was an adviser for George W. Bush and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center). In widely read articles that offended many on the right, Wehner had been urging Republicans to repudiate the extreme wing of their party. The fifth person present was Kate O’Beirne, a former National Review editor who was now a policy adviser to YG Network.