WEST MIAMI, Fla. — Years of carefully laid plans to repackage the Republican Party’s traditional ideas for a fast-changing country came crashing down here on Tuesday when Sen. Marco Rubio suspended his campaign for the presidency after a crippling defeat in his home-state primary.

Since Mitt Romney’s devastating loss in the 2012 presidential election, the Republican National Committee and leading voices at think tanks, editorial boards and Capitol Hill symposiums have charted a path back to the White House based on inclusive rhetoric and a focus on middle-class issues.

Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., speaks during a Republican primary night rally at Florida International University in Miami, Fla., on Tuesday.

Nobody embodied that vision better than Rubio, a charismatic standard-bearer for conservative orthodoxy who readily embraced the proposals of the right’s elite thinkers. The Florida senator spoke urgently and eloquently about raising stagnant wages and eradicating poverty. He had an immigrant’s tale to match the rhetoric. And on foreign affairs, he was a passionate defender of the party’s hawkish tilt.

But Rubio’s once-promising candidacy, as well as the conservative reform movement’s playbook, was spectacularly undone by Donald Trump and his defiant politics of economic and ethnic grievance. The drift toward visceral populism became an all-consuming rush, leaving Rubio and others unable to adjust.

“The party finds itself catching up to its base. Those very elegant papers it published and conferences it held may have been good and smart, but they didn’t really matter,” said William J. Bennett, a conservative talk-show host and former education secretary in Ronald Reagan’s administration. “Instead, everyone who’s been prominent for the last 15 to 20 years finds themselves getting pushed out.”

REPUBLICAN MAINSTAYS SCRAMBLE

Rubio’s fall comes weeks after others who advocated for conservative reforms, such as former Florida governor Jeb Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, have dropped out of the race, and as the donors and institutions who have long supported hawkish policies on fiscal and foreign policies find themselves scrambling to hold onto the consensus that has shaped the GOP for decades.

For many of them, Trump represents a threat to the traditional order of the party and its platform. He does not support overhauling Social Security – a key plank for Romney and GOP congressional leaders – and he was a vocal critic of the 2003 invasion of Iraq in its aftermath, setting him apart from much of the party’s high command.

Rubio, whose ascent was propelled by a network of powerful players for years, was supposed to be the candidate best-positioned to stop Trump and prevent a Republican rupture.

“Rubio was ready and briefed on policy, that’s for sure, but I just think he never connected,” said former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is friendly with Trump. “He sounded like someone who was trying to be a lot for a lot of people. That’s hard to do.”

Following Romney’s defeat in an election many Republicans thought they should have won, party leaders concluded that the only way to regain the presidency would be to engage the growing and diverse electorate that President Barack Obama had won over twice. The RNC drafted an “autopsy” that recommended bolstering appeals to women and minority voters, while reform conservatives drafted their own manifesto.

Rubio had been building his base among these Republicans since January 2011, when he began his Senate term. He joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and began to speak at think tanks and meet with scholars, most of them former staffers from George W. Bush’s administration. He hired a number of them for his own staff.

During his breaks in the Senate, Rubio would often tell colleagues how he was reading papers sent to him from former Republican officials or how he was about to meet with another bold-faced name from the Bush years for lunch. On his computer, he kept a “drop box” of related policy files compiled by his advisers.

WHAT ABOUT WORKING CLASS?

Meanwhile, a group of writers and intellectuals on the right were frustrated and stewing about the GOP’s lack of outreach to working-class voters during Romney’s campaign. By 2013, they began to call themselves “reform conservatives” and sought to turn the party policy discussion away from its emphasis on small business and toward working men and women who were struggling.

As Rubio took the lead on immigration reform that year – a move that riled the hard right – he continued to bolster his relationships with reform conservatives who were unveiling plans for new child tax credits and revamped federal subsidies. He put out a book, “American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone.”

Rubio followed a similar path with foreign-policy hawks as they began to look for a favorite ahead of the 2016 contest: a flurry of meetings and op-ed articles and, most critically, solidarity on the issues as they bubbled up.

Although Rubio entered 2015 hobbled with parts of the GOP base because of immigration, he carried goodwill among two constituencies that were driving the Republican establishment: the reformers and the hawks.

“The critique was there: The Republican Party was out of touch,” said Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former George W. Bush speechwriter. “But the breakdown occurred because we got into a cycle where policy didn’t matter at all. Policy was not just secondary, but it was almost not even in the conversation. And when people tried to interject policy – whether it was Rubio or Bush or others – there was just no appetite for it. It didn’t catch on.”

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich said that Rubio campaigned in a way that quickly became obsolete.

“Rubio was prepared, much like Jeb Bush, for a reasonable dialogue in Washington policy language, offering positions that reflect 40 years of national security and foreign-policy experts. All of that disappeared. The market didn’t care,” Gingrich said.

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