After Election Day, the conventional wisdom was that the GOP needed to make gains among Hispanics to win in 2016. Fox News' Brit Hume and Sean Hannity, for instance, quickly assessed the GOP needed to cave on immigration reform. Half a year later, Hume and Hannity have flipped. Hannity doubts that immigration will help Republicans, while Hume says the demographic arguments are “baloney,” since the Hispanic vote is “not nearly as important, still, as the white vote.” Hannity and Hume aren’t alone. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, says white voters stayed home because the Republican Party didn’t stay conservative enough. And as MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin put it, “you can hear the ‘missing whites’ thesis everywhere if you look for it.”

That thesis has led conservatives to embrace a different electoral strategy than their more moderate counterparts: more gains with white voters.

Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics makes the strongest case for a whiter Republican coalition. In a four-part demographic tour de force, he argues that the GOP doesn’t have much to gain from immigration reform, since Hispanics just aren’t a very big part of the electorate and immigration reform wouldn’t yield big GOP gains among Hispanics, anyway. Instead, Trende says the GOP should deepen its existing coalition by making additional gains among white voters, energizing the missing white voters, and counting on a decline in black support for the next Democratic candidate.

As a matter of arithmetic, Trende is right: Hispanics were only about 9 or 10 percent of the electorate in 2012, and Obama won the national popular vote by 3.9 points. For the GOP to gain 3.9 points out of 9 percent of the electorate, they’d need to improve by a net-43 points with Hispanics, all but eliminating Obama’s 44 point margin of victory. That isn’t going to happen in a competitive election. The importance of Hispanics is further reduced by the Electoral College, since they are disproportionately concentrated in solid red or blue states: Hispanics represent more than 5 percent of the electorate in only three of the twelve most competitive states.

Massive GOP gains among Hispanics just couldn't have elected Romney. Only Florida would have flipped. And since Hispanics are just a fraction of the electorate in many of the most pivotal states—like New Hampshire, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—it’s conceivable that the next GOP victory might not involve big gains among Hispanics. That’s why I’ve argued here, here, here, and here that the focus on immigration reform and Hispanics is misplaced. And that’s why immigration reform is more important as a test of the GOP’s willingness to rebrand than as a means to single-handedly secure the White House.