You may be asking: Why should we focus on Romney-Clinton voters, since their support ultimately did not win Hillary Clinton the White House? It’s a fair question, and the answer is simple.

First, it’s important to remember that while Trump carried the Electoral College, nearly 3 million more Americans voted for Clinton—she earned more votes than any presidential candidate in history except Obama. If we accept the fact that there were a number of voters who supported both Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016—and that their shift from one party’s candidate to the other to the other was decisive in tipping the Electoral College—then where did Clinton make up the difference to win the popular vote?

According to exit polls, 52 percent of white women voted for Trump in 2016, while four years earlier, 56 percent voted for Romney. Among college graduates, just 42 percent supported Trump; in 2012, 48 percent of college graduates supported Romney. The education gap among whites was especially revealing: 67 percent of whites without a college degree supported Trump, a 14-point jump from Romney in 2012; 45 percent of whites with a college degree voted for Clinton, a 10-point increase over Obama in 2012. In fact, prior to the closing month of the campaign—which was dominated by the slow-rolling release of the exploits of Russia’s hacking and culminated with FBI Director James Comey’s now-infamous letter to Congress about the discovery of new emails in the Clinton case—both internal and public polling showed an even greater crossover vote, suggesting that these voters are even more open to Democrats than we saw on Election Day.

This poses deep risks for Republicans because these voters have long been a key cohort of the GOP’s electoral coalition.