Then Donald Trump happened. And now the question isn’t whether Republicans can do better with non-whites, but just how much worse they’re going to do. There’s reason to believe that the answer is that they’re going to do much, much worse. In fact, they may well have dug themselves into a hole so deep it will take years if not decades for them to climb out.

Let’s look at some things we’ve learned or have happened just in the past few days:

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The public opinion firm Latino Decisions has released their new prediction model , which forecasts that Hillary Clinton will beat Donald Trump among Latinos by a margin of 82-15. This follows on another national poll of Latinos showing Clinton winning by 83-11. This would be a significant change from 2012, when Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney among Latinos by 71-27. Many analyses of voting and demographic trends had predicted that if Republicans couldn’t garner 40 percent of the Latino vote it would be almost impossible for them to win the White House.

A new study of Asian-Americans, the fastest-growing minority group in the country, shows Clinton leading Trump by 70-20 among registered voters. Only 16 percent of Asian-Americans now call themselves Republicans.

Reports are coming in from states like North Carolina and Wisconsin showing that Republican officials are desperately trying to resist court orders to undo voter suppression efforts. In places like Texas , officials have reacted to such court rulings by trying to make it harder for minorities to register to vote in the first place.

In Florida, governor Rick Scott has refused to extend the period when voters can register beyond the deadline of next Tuesday, despite the chaos that Hurricane Matthew is likely to bring over the next few days, Many interpret this as a decision meant to ensure that as few Latinos as possible, including recent arrivals from Puerto Rico, are able to register in time for the election.

After being consumed with the Alicia Machado story for days, media outlets serving Latinos (both English- and Spanish-language) have been giving enormous attention to Mike Pence’s “that Mexican thing” comment from the vice-presidential debate, which has become a viral meme.

The Republican ticket still can’t seem to decide whether or not it wants to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

This morning, Trump charged that the Obama administration is allowing undocumented immigrants to “pour into this country so they can go and vote.”

Trump continues to instruct his nearly all-white audiences to go out and monitor polls in “certain areas” for mythological voter fraud, because “we can’t lose an election because of you know what I’m talking about.” Everyone knows what he’s talking about.

It’s important to understand that the endless string of offenses to minority groups are not a series of isolated and discrete cases. When the Republican nominee says he wants to ban Muslims, Asian-Americans see that and understand that it has something to do with them, too. When he describes contemporary African-American life as though all he knows about it comes from watching “Death Wish” in 1974, Latinos hear it as an indirect message about them. When he talks about how we need to keep out immigrants, Jewish voters see their own history being replayed.

On that last point, I can tell you that as a liberal political commentator, I’ve always gotten plenty of hateful emails and tweets, but only this year have I gotten anti-Semitic hatred directed my way. Judging from what other writers and commentators have said publicly, my experience is a common one.

This is what Donald Trump has unleashed — and he did it with purpose and intent. From the first day of his campaign when he talked about Mexicans being rapists and criminals, he has told his supporters to vent their ugliest impulses, to put their resentments and their rage on display for all to see. Acting as though everyone is worthy of equal respect is nothing more than “political correctness,” he told them, so let your flag fly, even if it has the stars and bars or something worse on it.

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What happens when this election is over? Is this beast that Trump has loosed on the land going to slink back from whence it came? Or are the Republicans who run for president in four years going to have to cater to it, accommodate it, step gingerly around it? What would happen to a Republican with presidential ambitions who genuinely condemned the anti-Muslim rants, the “Trump That Bitch” t-shirts, the “Build that wall!” chants? He’d probably wind up like Jeb Bush.

The rest of the party hopes this is something they can finesse, that once 2016 is over memories will begin to fade and Republicans can start with a clean slate. But they’ll be doing that while still supporting so many of the policies Trump is advocating, and pushing their own. Is there a single prominent Republican who has opposed the party’s nationwide effort to suppress the votes of minorities? If so, I haven’t noticed any. So do supposedly reasonable Republicans think that they can try to make it as hard as possible for minorities to register and vote, justified on laughably phony fears of “voter fraud,” then turn around and tell minorities, “By the way, if you happen to make it past the obstacles we’ve put in front of you, we’d like you consider the GOP when you get to the polls”?

I suspect they’re hoping that minority voters will look at the vote suppression effort the same way Republicans themselves do: It’s not personal, it’s just business. If you weren’t voting for Democrats, we wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop you from voting.

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