After President Obama’s relatively easy reelection, analysts and commentators wondered whether his young and diverse coalition would outlive his presidency. Many believe, based mainly on their intuition, that 2008 and 2012 were the anomalous results of a historic candidacy. On the other hand, the country is getting more and more diverse with each passing year. Recently, one prominent demographer at the Brookings Institute used the exit polls to argue that Obama would have lost if turnout rates returned to ’04 levels. But his effort was misguided and premature.

Today, the Census released the November 2012 Current Population Survey (CPS) Voting and Registration Supplement, which is based on interviews with hundreds of thousands of residents. The CPS asks Americans whether they participated in the last election. The CPS is imperfect like any survey, but it is considered the gold standard for analyzing turnout. It demonstrates that, in the debate about the GOP’s future in an increasingly diverse America, both sides are right, to a certain extent. On the one hand, Obama’s historic candidacy led to historic black turnout. On the other hand, the Obama coalition is the product of irreversible demographic changes. If Republicans hope to win presidential elections, they will need to broaden their appeal—not just count on lower minority turnout in the post-Obama era.

Unsurprisingly, the CPS found that the 2012 electorate was more diverse than any in history. Whites represented just 73.7 percent of the electorate, down from 76.3 in 2008 and 79.2 percent in 2004. In comparison, the exit polls found that whites represented 72 percent of the electorate in 2012, compared to 74 percent in 2008 and 77 percent in 2004. For the first time, the CPS found that black turnout rates exceed white turnout rates, with 66.2 percent of voting age blacks turning out, compared to 64.1 percent of whites. Many expected that black turnout would decline in 2012, but the CPS actually found that black turnout was even higher in 2012 than it was in 2008, increasing from 64.7 to 66.2 percent.

Contrary to the pre-election expectations of many commentators, the CPS found that non-Hispanic white (henceforth white) and Hispanic turnout rates declined: Hispanic turnout fell from 49.9 percent to 48 percent, while white turnout declined from 66.1 to 64.1 percent of voting age citizens. Even so, the growing Hispanic share of the population allowed the Hispanic share of the electorate to increase by a full point, from 7.4 to 8.4 percent.