Way back in the days after the 2012 election, the last Republican presidential defeat, all the conventional wisdom in American politics converged on a simple idea: The GOP was doomed as a national institution unless it became, in effect, a moderate party of the business class, stiff-arming social conservatives and wooing Hispanic voters by promising more liberal immigration laws.

Against this consensus, a few observers made dissenting points: First, a lot of working-class white voters who tilted Republican had stayed home amid Mitt Romney's business-class campaign in 2012, and second, the Hispanic vote was hardly a single-issue-voting, pro-immigration monolith.