Nancy Kaffer

Detroit Free Press Columnist

The Republican National Committee's internal post-mortem of the 2012 presidential election was a come-to-Jesus moment: Republicans had lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Unless the party made some serious changes, courting women and minorities both as voters and as candidates, this trend would continue. The electoral authority of the voters who had bolstered the GOP for decades — white men — had been compromised by women and people of color, and the GOP had failed to make inroads with either group. Also, the report noted, there should be fewer debates.

It was a rare moment of unflinching honesty, the kind of self-evaluation that could, and should, lead to serious thought followed by real change.

Immigration reform, done with sensitivity to the concerns of Hispanic and other voters likely to hold affinity for immigrants, should be a top priority, the 2012 report found. "Hispanic voters" — a growing part of the electorate — "tell us our party's position on immigration has become a litmus test, measuring whether we are meeting them with a welcome mat or a closed door," the report's authors wrote.

Here's another finding: "When it comes to social issues" — this means gay marriage and access to birth control and abortion — "the party must in fact and deed be inclusive and welcoming. If we are not, we will limit our ability to attract young people and others, including many women, who agree with us on some but not all issues."

And basically, none of it happened.

Over the course of the 2016 campaign, the GOP's leading presidential candidates discarded almost entirely the party's reform playbook. And they had lots of debates.

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The thoroughness with which the GOP didn't make the changes it self-prescribed would almost amuse — if voters weren't the butt of the joke.

The signature of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump's campaign is a pledge to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, at Mexico's expense. He's said the U.S. should bar immigrants from Muslim countries. His rallies draw tens of thousands, but they're notoriously wild; Trump's chosen method of communication seems, at times, to be racial and ethnic insensitivity. And the stuff he says about women is pretty gross.

That Trump didn't care much for the party line isn't surprising. He has few friends in the Republican establishment, and his positions seem chosen at random from an ideological grab-bag designed to score points with whomever he's facing. Consistency? Viability? These don't seem to be things Trump worries about.

But take Trump out of the picture, and it's hard to see any impact driven by the 2012 post-mortem on the other one-time GOP frontrunners.

Comparative moderates, like Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — who don't believe that illegal immigrants should be deported en masse — flopped. (One of the report's key findings was that Republican governors offered hopeful templates for building broad voter coalitions. Oh well.)

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Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the second-highest vote-getter, employed much of the same hardline rhetoric, recommending the U.S. apply a religious test to immigrants from countries with Muslim populations. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio suggested barring immigration from "that part of the world." Cruz doesn't believe in amnesty for undocumented immigrants. Re: deportation, he says, we should "enforce the law." Rubio, at least, didn't endorse mass deportation, but on social questions, neither man has what the report might call an "inclusive and welcoming" stance.

There's no question that, in some instances, Trump's roughshod campaigning pushed his competitors farther ... I don't know if you'd even call it "right." But none of the candidates who found favor with primary voters followed the more tolerant path the 2012 post-mortem marked as the way forward.

Many of the report's prescriptions represent strong ideological shifts that party rank-and-file find abhorrent. But it was a path that would keep the Republican Party relevant in a changing electorate.

Trump has built his success almost exclusively in opposition to the report's policy prescriptions, and his base on the white men the 2012 post-mortem said could not sustain future presidential wins. (From a numbers standpoint, this is still true: Trump won the primary with fewer than half of all votes cast; to win the presidency, Trump will need to win seven in 10 white male voters.)

It's bad policy, but it's also bad politics.

Politics is the way policy gets implemented. It's the process of finding sufficient commonality among coalitions with sometimes divergent interests to get policy passed. In its best iteration, that coalition-building means diverse participants get input, and a chance to ensure that policy works for different kinds of people. In its worst iteration, it's partisan squabbling and gridlock.

Whether Trump wins or loses — or if the eleventh-hour move to choose another nominee gathering steam among some Republicans is successful — one wonders what remedy the GOP's next post-mortem will prescribe.

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