In an attempt to redirect the national conversation in Republicans’ favor, the House minority leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy, will roll out a new “Commitment to America” this Friday.

With the summer’s headlines focused on abortion and President Trump and his legal drama, Republicans have been suffering in the polls, in part because of their opposition to Roe v. Wade and unwavering support for the former president.

Mr. McCarthy, however, hatched a plan to change the topic of conversation away from these losing issues and toward areas in which Republicans enjoy broader popular support.

The plan is labeled a “Commitment to America,” a set of policies that the GOP is promising to enact should the party take control of Congress.

So far, it’s known that it will include promises to bring down the price of energy, reduce crime, “fund the police,” create jobs, provide a parents’ bill of rights, secure the border, and stop opioid trafficking. 

“There’s a plan for a new direction for America, one that will curb inflation, give us lower gas prices, make your streets safer again, but also give parents a say on their kids’ education and bring accountability back to this government,” Mr. McCarthy told Reuters of the plan.

The plan is descendent of the 1994 “Contract with America,” a brainchild of the then speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, and the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

In an opinion piece for Fox News, Mr. Gingrich writes that, because of Mr. McCarthy’s plan, Americans could “expect bold dramatic changes toward a more open, citizen-friendly House” come January.

“I can report that McCarthy’s effort is the largest, most inclusive, and most systematic issue development effort I have ever seen,” he wrote, suggesting that his efforts would result in “the largest majority ever.”

While Mr. Gingrich has made bold claims about the program and the success it will deliver Republicans, there are some reasons for skepticism.

The first is that the minority leader deployed almost the exact same strategy in 2020, but the new platform neither seemed to help Republicans in the polls nor divert attention from Mr. Trump.

In 2020 they promised that they would “defeat the virus,” ensure safe and secure communities, create jobs, secure the border, and fight the opioid epidemic, among other things — a strikingly similar set of ideas to what they are proposing this year.

Leaders already flubbed the rollout of the Commitment to America once. The plan was supposed to arrive Monday, but was delayed for reasons unknown.

The people at the Lincoln Project, a group founded by former Republicans and bankrolled by anti-Trump activists, seem to think the delay was related to an attack ad they put out following leaks from Mr. McCarthy’s office.

“When we heard that you were going to do a Contract with America two-point-o — you know, slap an old Frank Luntz strategy from the 1990’s and Newt Gingrich into the microwave and hope it comes out right — we laughed,” a Lincoln Project co-founder and former Republican strategist, Rick Wilson, said.

Republican House leadership appeared Tuesday at a press conference to tout the new program and to blame “far left Democratic rule in Washington,” in the words of the third-ranking House Republican, Representative Elise Stefanik, for the problems that face America today.

At the same press conference, the second-ranking Republican House member, Representative Steve Scaliese, said that the border would play a bigger role in the new messaging, a reference to the latest political stunts from Governors DeSantis and Abbott.

In the opinion of a political scientist at John Jay College, Brian Arbour, the only way that Mr. McCarthy’s bid to commandeer the national conversation will succeed is if he can get Mr. Trump and other 2024 presidential hopefuls to be quiet through the midterms, something he thinks is unlikely.

A new Contract with America, he said, is not going to do that.

“I am strongly of the opinion that the Contract with America was only meaningful after the 1994 election, and had very little impact during the election itself,” he tells the Sun. “No one knew who Newt Gingrich was until election night 1994.”