Last night I won a bet for a donut. A conservative friend had a few months ago wagered that Senator Cruz of Texas was going to win his re-election by 10-20 points. Under normal and recent political conditions he would have been on safe ground with that stand, Texas is very Republican, by 538’s standard it is 16 point more Republican than the average US state, and Cruz’s opponent was not running as a conservative Democratic choice but rather as an openly liberal politician. In recent history those two factors would have combined for a GOP blowout but that’s not the environment we are in and why I bet that Cruz would not win by such margins. (I never bet that Cruz would lose, the odds were always against that outcome.) Last night Cruz won by 3 points, in Texas, against liberal Democrat, in the context of an economy with unemployment under 4%. And on the same night the GOP lost control of the House. To me only one thing truly explains these atypical results – Trump.

The Republican Party has become the Party of Trump. Those who do not stand with Trump have been chased out of the party and more and more candidates no only embrace Trump personally but emulate him to court his supporters. In order to win the primaries a Republican needs to be like Trump. But as we witnessed last night there are great swaths of the general electorate that are repelled by Trump and his brand. To be clear that is not universally true, the GOP has expanded their senate holdings, though the battleground favored them in that respect, and they look to gain some Governorships in George and Florida while losing Wisconsin and Kansas.

Mid-Term election typically drew fewer and more committed voters and while I have not yet seen final number this mid-term looked to buck that trend bring a larger and more diverse set of voters to the polls. If, and this is a big if, these voters have become more engaged and are not a fluke of the times, then that does not portend well for the Republican’s in 2020. Though of course nothing that far off is even close to becoming set in stone, between now and then there will be investigations, crises, unexpected events, and an unknown economy, but this year should have been a very good year for the party in power had it not been poisoned with Trump corrosive, insulting, and repellent nature.