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The story begins in the aftermath of the 2012 election, which Mitt Romney lost after receiving just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote. The Republican National Committee responded with a now-infamous report that’s come to be known as the “autopsy,” which urged the party to rebrand itself with women, young people, and minorities, or face a demographic death spiral. It made only one policy recommendation: to attract Hispanic voters, the party must embrace immigration reform.

Romney had taken a hard line on immigration, at one point urging “self-deportation”—that is, making it harder for undocumented immigrants to work in the U.S. so they would willingly return to their home countries. Post-election, commentators across the political spectrum blamed Romney’s loss on this stance.

One such commentator was then-reality-TV-star Donald Trump. “He had a crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal,” Trump told the conservative website Newsmax. “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”

The effort to get Republicans behind immigration reform almost worked. In the Senate, a bipartisan “Gang of Eight,” including Marco Rubio, drafted legislation that was backed by a broad coalition, from the Chamber of Commerce to the AFL-CIO. It passed the Senate with 68 votes, including 14 Republicans.

But it still had to get through the House of Representatives. Aware that Republican members of Congress feared a backlash from their base, immigration reformers labored to convince them that reform was politically popular—and that it was the only way for the GOP to have a prayer of winning another presidential election.

In 2014, FWD.us, the immigration-advocacy group backed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, recruited a who’s who of prominent Republican pollsters to make the reform-or-die argument, in a last-ditch push to get reform legislation through the House. The 10 pollsters concluded that supporting the Gang of Eight bill would help Republicans with swing voters without hurting them with their base. “Supporting this new immigration reform proposal should be good electoral politics for Republicans,” they wrote in a joint memo. One of the 10 was Kellyanne Conway.

The report was scheduled for release to the media on June 11, 2014. On June 10, a political meteor hit: Then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defeated in his Republican primary by a little-known challenger who had hammered him for being soft on immigration. Any hope for immigration reform died that day. Many Republicans worried their party’s 2016 presidential hopes had died, too. Without immigration reform, the head of the Chamber of Commerce said, the party might as well not bother to run a presidential candidate at all.