Back in 2012, the Republican Party, feeling stung by its electoral losses, decided to do a serious postmortem to discover why it was having such a hard time in national elections. GOP leaders had convinced themselves that they had an excellent chance to beat Barack Obama and take control of the Senate, and from their point of view the stars seemed to be aligned.
Their presidential nominee that year, Mitt Romney, had been a popular and reasonably successful governor of a blue state (Massachusetts) and Democrats were defending 23 Senate seats in that cycle (including two independents) while Republicans only had to defend 10. It was the first congressional election after the 2010 redistricting, and looked to be brutal for Democrats in the House. But Obama won re-election handily, while Democrats also gained two seats in the Senate and eight in the House. At that point Republicans had only won the popular vote for president once in 24 years, and they understood that something was wrong.
