Yet Obama's real luck came with Hurricane Sandy, which wiped off the airwaves the genuine momentum that the Romney campaign had built up since his impressive victory in the first presidential debate of October 3, and replaced it with a president in an anorak in the Rose Garden (when it wasn't even raining) showing a decisive side that was intended to remind everyone of the day he ordered the strike on Osama bin Laden. If the hurricane had hit earlier, the sheen would have worn off, with tens of thousands of Americans still without electricity in their homes even a week later. Although it rather undermined Obama's 2008 campaign promise to stop the oceans from rising, Sandy meant that all the mainstream media's news channels could gleefully wipe Romney off their programming for nearly five of the crucial last seven days of the campaign. It also terminated the Benghazi cover-up scandal, which was starting to turn toxic for the Administration, and which, as one Romney aide pointed out to me, "is worse than Watergate; no one died in Watergate".

For the first time since 1816, America has seen three two-term presidents elected consecutively. Even before I left the Convention Center in Boston, clumps of Republicans were locked in recriminations over how Obama could have been re-elected, with 8 per cent unemployment and such a woeful performance at home and abroad. To a Briton, it was very reminiscent of the night of John Major's evisceration at the hands of Tony Blair on May 1, 1997. What the Republican party must not now do is go through the 13-year period of bitter self-laceration that the Tories endured. They must look carefully at the psephological runes, analyse the problem, and act accordingly. Also, they should acknowledge that Obama, like Tony Blair, is a political phenomenon that comes along only very rarely.

The first psephological truth about the Republican party was visibly apparent in the Convention Center: there were very, very few Hispanics and Asians there and almost no blacks. While blacks remained at 13 per cent of the electorate in 2012, the growing Hispanic population accounted for 10 per cent of the electorate, a figure that is universally expected to rise in future elections. Whereas George W. Bush won 40 per cent of the Hispanic vote in 2004, Romney got only 29 per cent of it, the lowest share since Bob Dole ran in 1996. In swing states such as Colorado, Obama won the Hispanic vote by 87 per cent to 10 per cent, in Nevada 80 per cent to 17 per cent and in Virginia 66 per cent to 31 per cent.

There is no reason why the Christian, hard-working, capitalist Latinos of America should forever fit into Obama's coalition of the takers, rather than the Republicans' coalition of America's makers. One can understand why the young—who also turned out in numbers comparable to 2008—might have fallen for Obama's idealistic rhetoric, but why should Latinos in Florida have broken for him by 58 per cent to 40 per cent? The argument for having Florida Senator Marco Rubio as the Republican candidate in 2016 is now an even stronger one, on ethnic grounds alone. Similarly, there's no reason why the even more hard-working and capitalist Asian-Americans, who now represent 3 per cent of the electorate and growing—should be so much in the Democrat camp, with an amazing 75 per cent of them voting for Obama.

The way in which the Republicans allowed Romney to be defined during the summer as a heartless, devil-take-the hindmost capitalist, and spent only $73 million in campaign ads rebutting the charges compared to Obama's $173 million up to the end of August, might have been the ultimate strategic reason why Romney lost, but that lesson can be learned for future campaigns. Far more difficult will be attempting to tailor the Republicans' stance on immigration, which is traditionally seen as the issue that Hispanics care most about. Obama has already been speaking about immigration reform, which is code for legalising some of the estimated 11 million Hispanics who are in the US illegally. Should even a fraction of these new voters be brought into the same Democratic coalition that won on November 6, the Republicans fear they will never govern America again. Yet if they oppose the legalisation, Republicans equally fear they will never win the trust and affection of Hispanics, who will vote Democrat tribally for as long as the Thirties New Dealers, their children and even grandchildren, supported the Democrats.