IT WOULD be uncharitable to suggest, as some Democrats do, that the majority of Republicans are racist or sexist or xenophobic or big Ayn Rand readers. Most Republicans, I think, are none of the above. But for some reason the people who have spent the past few years lashing out against women, and Hispanics, and gays, and non-Christians, and poor people, all seem to come from the Republican party. That's why the Republicans lost yesterday. It's nice that some of them seem to get that, but it's alarming that some don't, and are even drawing the opposite conclusion:

Some analysts and Republican strategists argued that the party could not win while alienating the growing Hispanic vote with its tough stance on immigration, could no longer afford to nominate candidates who fired up its conservative and Tea Party wings but turned off the more moderate voters in general elections, and that it had to find ways to win more support from women and young voters. But some conservatives took the opposite view, arguing that Mitt Romney had been essentially too moderate, a candidate who had won the minds if not the hearts of the party’s base.

It is just not credible to say that Mr Romney lost because he failed to secure the base. The evidence suggests that he lost because he failed to secure anyone other than the base. Exit polls found that women supported Mr Obama by about a 12-point margin in 2008; they favored him by a similar margin this time around. Among Hispanics, Mr Obama expanded his lead, winning about 75% of the vote to Mr Romney's 23%. The tendency to favour Democrats is not, of course, some fixed character trait of women and Hispanics, neither of whom are, as you might have heard, a monolithic voting bloc. Rather, it's a reasonable response to a party that's shown a pattern of contempt for them. In places where the local Republicans haven't given in to their worst impulses, the voters respond accordingly. In the days before yesterday's election, for example, Baselice & Associates came out with a poll of Texas voters that had a striking finding. While Barack Obama was polling ahead of Mitt Romney among the state's Hispanic voters, his lead—49% to 40%—was only big, not ludicrous.

Mr Romney was far from perfect as a candidate. But a party's presidential nominee is, inevitably, its standard-bearer, and his party dragged him down. Think about a critical swing state like Virginia, which has a rapidly growing Hispanic population, and a controversial new sonogram bill. This year it had a closely watched Senate race between two former governors, Tim Kaine and George Allen, one of whom is a Democrat and the other of whom lost his first campaign for Senate after using an obscure racial slur to refer to an Indian-American bystander. Mr Kaine won by about five points, and interest in the downballot race may have helped the president, who carried the state by three.

In other words, in Virginia and elsewhere, the moderate Republicans lost this election. The far right lost even harder. The path forward for the Republican Party lies in a return to the centre, not further regression. "But, but, but ladyparts!" sneered one conservative on Twitter as the results were coming in—the kind of comment that does not boost my confidence in the party's ability to quickly recalibrate. On the other hand, Americans can take pride in the fact that a majority of them voted in favour of each other. Even if the Democratic Party's policies are not always to their liking, its intention of inclusion clearly is.