President Donald Trump’s supporters can be forgiven for being a little irritated with outgoing Rep. Mia Love. In her concession speech, Love reciprocated the attacks she received from the president, insisting that Trump has “no real relationships, just convenient transactions.” Well, politics is transactional, and Love’s bond with the titular leader of the Republican Party was only as strong as his capacity to help her retain federal office. By her own admission, Love is now “unleashed, untethered,” and “unshackled.” She can tell the truth about Trump but only because her obligations to her district and her party are severed. That sounds more than a little transactional to the average ear.

But Love’s unbound truth-telling did end with a series of deserved, if a little self-serving, admonitions for Trump, and the president’s fans would be foolish to dismiss them. Love criticized Washington’s political culture for having a similarly transactional relationship with minorities, but she singled out the GOP. “Because Republicans never take minority communities into their home and citizens into their homes and into their hearts, they stay with Democrats and bureaucrats in Washington because they do take them home,” the outgoing congresswoman said, “or at least make them feel like they have a home.”

If conservative Republicans are inclined to dismiss these warnings, there’s some evidence on their side. The GOP’s “Growth and Opportunity Project,” a postmortem on the party’s 2012 presidential campaign nicknamed “the autopsy,” suggested that the Republican Party’s was “marginalizing itself” with the coalition of voters it needed to win the presidency—namely, young people, women, and, especially, minorities. Four years later, Donald Trump demonstrated that the autopsy was wrong by assembling the very coalition the report seemed to suggest was no longer possible. Trump drove up white turnout without generating equivalent turnout among Democrat-leaning African-Americans, and he did better in percentage terms with black and Hispanic voters than Mitt Romney.

This is a common but shallow misreading of the autopsy. Trump’s economically populist vision for the GOP—more Eisenhower than Goldwater—was, in a way, an outgrowth of the recommendations in the 2012 autopsy. “The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself,” the report concluded. “We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue.” Trump abandoned conservatism’s ideological attachments to liberal economic prescriptions and frugality to craft a winning populist message and a new coalition of voters.

But Trumpian economic populism came with a catch: cultural revanchism that frequently manifested in forms indistinguishable from racial agitation. In his first year in office, Trump leaned into racially tinged culture wars—from the menace of kneeling football players to the untold millions of illegal immigrant voters who allegedly stole a popular vote victory from the president. Trump made Steve Bannon, the proprietor of a blog he once proudly called “the platform for the alt-right,” his chief strategist. Trump preemptively pardoned Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt related to his unapologetic racial profiling. He spent a full week wrestling with himself over just how much scorn was appropriate for the white nationalist demonstrators in Charlottesville, one of whom killed a peaceful counter-demonstrator. Year two opened with “s***hole countries” and culminated in a crisis of his own making at the border—the separation of migrant children from parents for what administration officials said was an effort to establish “deterrence.”

This agitation was bound to generate a response, and its force is now upon the GOP. An estimated 11 percent of the 2018 electorate was Latino, which is roughly equivalent to their share of the eligible voter population (12.8 percent of all potential voters). Sixty-nine percent of them voted for Democratic candidates, according to exit polls. Hispanics are by some measures one of the fastest growing demographics in the nation, and that growth was particularly pronounced in one of the GOP’s few remaining strongholds: the southeast.

In 2016, African-American turnout declined for the first time in a presidential election in 20 years, but black voters rediscovered that lost enthusiasm in the Trump era. Nearly twice as many African-Americans turned out in 2018 as they did in the 2014 midterm cycle—a performance on par with a presidential election cycle. According to a report sponsored by the NAACP, 90 percent of black voters cast their ballots for Democratic candidates. The Congressional Black Caucus added nine new minority members to the rolls, making it potentially one of the most influential caucuses in the 116th Congress.

That report also found that 72 percent of African-American voters felt Democrats were doing a good job of reaching out to black voters, while only 12 percent said as much about the Republican Party. And as many as 8 in 10 back voters said Trump made them feel “angry” and “disrespected,” and they claimed that his casual agitation represented “a major setback to racial progress.”

It takes a special kind of innumeracy for a Republican to look at these numbers with anything other than existential dread. The Democratic Party turned in their best performance in a midterm election since 1974 despite high Republican engagement and increased turnout. GOP voters showed up; they just didn’t exist in numbers large enough to prevent a Democratic wave, and the left’s apparent lock on minority voters contributed to Democratic dominance.

Conservatives cannot compromise their principled objections to expanded entitlement programs or positive racial discrimination, but they can and have embraced policies that they reasonably believe have better potential to advance minority interests than their Democratic and liberal counterparts. But this isn’t about policy. No one is going to listen to you if they think you don’t respect them.

Mia Love is right. And while Democrats do their fair share of cynical racial agitating, it’s the GOP that has a minority-voter problem. In the end, Republicans who insist that Trump proved the autopsy wrong in 2016 must reckon with the fact that it was right in 2018 because it might be right again in 2020.