It’s been a long time since the Hawaii Republican Party had much relevance.

It’s been five years since any Republican held statewide office or a seat in Hawaii’s federal delegation. One might argue it’s really been irrelevant for more like a decade, back to Linda Lingle’s second-term election as governor of Hawaii.

At present, the party holds a paltry eight seats out of the 76-member Legislature. And if Tuesday’s poll results are any indication, registered Republicans like their position on the fringes of Hawaii politics and government service just fine, thank you.

How else to explain the resounding victory they handed GOP presidential candidate Donald J. Trump in the statewide Republican caucuses?

More than four out of every 10 caucus participants made Trump their choice, compared to just one-third of participants who lined up behind Sen. Ted Cruz.

Sen. Marco Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich finished a distant third and fourth, respectively.

It’s roughly a mirror image of the 2012 GOP caucus here, which another businessman candidate, Mitt Romney, won by a similar margin. That year’s social conservative runner-up role was played by Sen. Rick Santorum. But that’s where the 2012 results and this year’s part ways.

This campaign has been defined by Trump’s long and ever-growing list of racist, misogynist, sexist, demeaning, inappropriate and boorish comments, the low points of which hardly need be repeated here. But two matters of particular importance to Hawaii certainly do.

This is the same Donald Trump who in 2010 and 2011 made a headline-grabbing campaign over his insistence that Barack Obama’s birth in Hawaii was not a proven fact. He questioned the president’s honesty and integrity, claimed his own private investigators had uncovered revelatory information in Hawaii regarding Obama’s presumed real birthplace, and gave new life to the ugly, nakedly racist “birther” movement, which by that time had long since been wholly discredited.

It was only when Obama released the long-form version of his birth certificate and followed it up with a withering takedown of Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner that the Donald quietly put the matter to rest. The matter continued to be such an aggravation that then-gubernatorial candidate Neil Abercrombie promised to make quashing it a priority.

Jump to late last year, when, in a TIME magazine interview, Trump refused to say he would not have voted for Japanese internment during World War II. Instead, he justified implementation of questionable policies as an acceptable means to winning wars.

“It’s tough. But you know, war is tough,” he said. “And winning is tough. We don’t win anymore. We don’t win wars anymore. …We’re not a strong country anymore.”

In the context of an equally offensive ban he was advocating at the time against Muslims entering the United States, reaction to Trump’s Japanese internment camp comments forced him to clarify that he was not proposing internment camps for Muslims.

His supporters felt no similar restraint. A co-chair of Trump’s New Hampshire campaign, state Rep. Al Baldasaro, told the Huffington Post that the candidate’s proposed Muslim ban was “100 percent right” and “no different than the situation during World War II, when we put the Japanese in camps.”

Anyone with a passing familiarity with Hawaii knows that a sizable Japanese American population calls our islands home and that many of those individuals and families were touched by the World War II internment camp experience of an estimated 120,000 to 130,000 people, including about 1,800 in Hawaii.

Twenty-eight years ago, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act. It not only apologized for the internments, which had been found by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians to have been the product of racism, but provided for reparation payments of $20,000 to each camp survivor.

Those who attended ceremonies last year for the establishment of the Honouliuli Internment Camp site in Waipahu as a national monument understand the emotional pain still felt in Hawaii today by the victims’ descendants.

And yet, 42 percent of Hawaii GOP caucus goers cast their ballot for a candidate who very publicly has refused to condemn that shameful period in American history, one with lasting impact on their own neighbors. Sen. Brian Schatz tweeted his thoughts about the matter on Wednesday morning, in a post that quickly drew hundreds of retweets and likes:

Makes my stomach churn that Trump, who spoke favorably about the reprehensible internment of Japanese Americans, won Hawaii.

— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) March 9, 2016

Hawaii ranks as the nation’s second-most Democratic state. Voters who describe themselves as Democrats or leaning Democrat hold nearly a 21 percentage point advantage over Republicans. Only Vermont — home state of a certain Democratic Socialist also running for president — is marginally more Democratic.

In Tuesday’s caucus, GOP voters had the opportunity to offer their party as a legitimate alternative for those Democratic voters. They could have pushed back against their minority status by voting for a candidate who at least has shown basic civility toward America’s Hawaii-born president and sensitivity toward the Japanese American community that made modern-day Hawaii what it is.

Instead, they chose a man who has gone out of his way to disrespect and slur President Obama and who very publicly and very recently stuck his undersized thumb in the eye of our friends and neighbors.

Hard to imagine such a choice might persuade many new voters to choose the Republican box on their Hawaii voter registration.

More than 40 percent of Hawaii GOP caucus-goers have said, through their vote, that the continued irrelevance it portends for their party is perfectly fine by them.