For a guy who insists, no doubt sincerely, that he isn’t a politician and doesn’t need the elixir of victory, Mitt Romney has spent a lot of his life running for office. It’s been almost twenty years since he challenged Ted Kennedy in a Massachusetts Senate race. That campaign, his direction of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, and his one term as governor of Massachusetts in the early aughts were all planned and executed at a more than local level of ambition, with the idea of positioning him for bigger things—and within two or three years of taking office in Massachusetts, Romney was running for President, through two endlessly long election cycles. And now it’s over.

[#image: /photos/5909543d6552fa0be682ca2a]

Last night’s results demonstrate how far you can get in politics on determination, organizational skills, and fundraising. Romney, far less obviously talented as a politician than Barack Obama—or, for that matter, than George W. Bush or John McCain (both of whom, in their best days, could connect powerfully with a crowd)—came very close to winning the national popular vote and outperformed McCain in 2008 by quite a lot, in both electoral and popular votes. The diminishment in excitement around Obama this time around, compared to four years ago, shouldn’t obscure that in 2008 he was almost a political novice and in 2012 he was an incumbent President. It’s obvious only in retrospect that his Republican opponent would have had better odds this time than last.

The seeds of Romney’s defeat were sown during Bush’s second term. Bush and Karl Rove were fully aware of how unfavorable the country’s changing demographics were to the Republican Party. First-term initiatives like the No Child Left Behind education bill and the Medicare prescription-drug benefit were meant to lure important Democratic constituencies (mothers and senior citizens respectively) to the Republican side. After Bush’s reëlection, a big proposed change in the structure of Social Security was supposed to persuade Americans that they could entrust their retirement savings to an ever-rising stock market, instead of to the government, and a sweeping immigration-reform plan was supposed to bring Latino voters into the G.O.P. But these both failed; the intra-party revolt over immigration reform in the summer of 2006, which took the Bush White House by surprise, nearly guaranteed that in 2008 and 2012, the ever-rising number of Latino voters would represent wind in the Democrats’ sails.

The idea that Obama can be understood as a former community organizer feels over-simplified; the idea that Romney can be understood as a former management consultant, maybe not. Always briefed, always punctual, always impeccably neat, always selling, Romney seemed to regard the tricky politics of the Republican party—an increasingly unlikely coalition of business interests and social-issue populists—as a problem to be solved. All that was just an obstacle on the way to his real goal, which was applying the lessons of a lifetime doing turnarounds to the federal government. All Presidential candidates zig away from the center during the primaries and zag back to the center in the fall. Romney did this more stiffly than other Presidential candidates, more obviously—as if he were executing a PowerPoint strategic plan. But that’s who he is.

The morning after, everybody was saying that the Republican Party was in deep trouble: too much Tea Party; too few minorities, young people, and women. Don’t be so sure. In 2016, the Republican nominee will almost certainly be more dynamic and charming onstage than Romney, and the Democratic nominee will almost certainly be less inspiring than Obama. The economy, one hopes, will be better than it is now, and that will mean that voters’ natural impulse to look for government’s help during times of trouble will be reduced. The country won’t be mired in an unpopular Republican-originated war. In this campaign, Obama devoted most of his energies to making a case against Romney, not to building public support for his and his party’s agenda, and now a closely divided Washington will almost certainly deny him the chance to build a policy case for the next Democratic nominee. The Republicans will take every opportunity to build an argument that the Democrats are wild over-taxers and over-spenders, without letting them tax for and spend on programs that would obviously build gratitude and loyalty among middle-class voters.

Romney’s performance shows us the baseline level of what the national Republican apparatus, when fully funded and motivated, can achieve—and, compared to 2008, that level is rising. It will surely occur to the party elders that it won’t be hard to find a Presidential candidate more electrifying than Romney, and that it’s possible to change the nominating process so that it is not quite so empowering to the party’s minor figures and non-mainstream constituencies. Romney’s legacy will be whetting his party’s appetite for what might be possible without Romney as its leader. From a Republican point of view, that’s a real achievement on Romney’s part.

Read Lemann on the making of Mitt Romney.

Photograph by Matthew Cavanaugh/Getty.