If recent years are any indication, the electorate is not to be toyed with. Trying to govern the United States during the past half-decade has been like riding a mechanical bull – and Republicans have already been thrown off once.

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As the autumnal election season becomes visible on the horizon, Republicans with an eye to retaking congressional majorities are engaged in a roiling debate:  Is the GOP better off running on a platform of opposition to liberal misrule or developing an alternative agenda of conservative solutions?

The latter camp is represented by those misty for the days of Newt Gingrich, when the 1994 Republican Revolution swept to power on the basis of the Contract with America. With 18 specific promises about the reform agenda that the GOP would advance if it retook the majority, the Contract represented a stunning aberration in Washington politics: a preemptive acknowledgment of responsibility. House Republicans pledged to enact a specific agenda and invited the electorate to dismiss them if they failed.

The contrary view, embraced by much of the consultant class, is that Republicans shouldn’t unnecessarily complicate an easy victory. According to this theory, concrete stances on the issues provide ripe targets for Democrats looking to halt Republican momentum. And while this mindset may strike some as cynical, it comes with an impressive pedigree.

The Democratic gains of 2006 and 2008 owed largely to anti-Republican furies, not liberal creativity. Rahm Emanuel, heading the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, reportedly told candidates to spend 80 percent of their time attacking Republicans and only 20 percent offering alternative ideas. Given the daunting Democratic majorities that emerged in the aftermath, it should come as no surprise that many Republicans are anxious to appropriate Emanuel’s strategy as their own. But taking the low road to victory may undermine the GOP in the long run.

To understand why, one need look no further than the majorities engineered by Emanuel and his colleague Chuck Schumer in the Senate:  They’re crumbling. Having built a majority party around a heterodox coalition of coastal liberals and inland moderates – and with the help of a president seemingly indifferent to his own party’s congressional travails – Democrats have now found that they can’t hold the center in American politics. This provides two helpful lessons for Republicans as the midterms approach.

First, the easiest way to get someone to buy from you is to have something to sell. Democrats may have been able to ride anti-Bush sentiment to a majority, but because they never put meat on the bones of their governing agenda during campaign season, the public reacted with horror to the realities of the stimulus, ObamaCare, and cap and trade. Contrast that with the Republican Revolution, which gave the GOP virtually unbroken control of Congress for a dozen years and the power of having the public invested in your mandate becomes clear.

The second lesson is that, if recent years are any indication, the electorate is not to be toyed with. Trying to govern the United States during the past half-decade has been like riding a mechanical bull – and Republicans have already been thrown off once. In order to win the public’s trust once again, they’ll have to simultaneously redefine themselves on substance and overcome the widespread skepticism being directed at politicians of both parties. Creating an agenda for real change – and asking to be held accountable for it – would be a powerful first step on that path.