THE W-SHAPED HOLE IN THE PARTY:

When the parties don't go out of their way to repel voters, they can win decent majorities. The reason such majorities have become rare is that both parties have worked hard to become repulsive to the median voter.

This is probably a bigger problem for the Democrats in the long run, because they face the challenge of becoming the party of an intensely unpopular elite in a populist time. Swing voters don't like much of what the Democrats increasingly stand for, and that won't be easy for the party to change.

For Republicans, it should be clearer than ever that they have trouble reaching potentially winnable swing voters because of the unhinged appearance and revolting character of the party's Trump-era incarnation. It is easier to see how that could change, though that does not mean such change will be easy to pull off.

The pattern of Republican wins and losses on Tuesday was not random, and its message is not hard to discern. It presents itself as a blinking, blaring, screaming sign that reads "Republicans: Trump is your problem." In Georgia and in Ohio, Republican candidates for governor who were not closely associated with Trump ran far ahead of Republican candidates for Senate who were. Many voters were clearly willing to split their tickets. It is painfully evident that Republicans would have had a far easier time winning Senate seats in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire and elsewhere if they had not chosen the Trump-endorsed candidate in the primary.

The relatively disappointing result for Republicans has a clear cause, and maybe it will finally move Republicans to abandon the ridiculous notion that Donald Trump is an electoral advantage for the party. Sustaining that view has always required painful contortions -- the (implausible) view that Trump's exceedingly narrow win over Hillary Clinton in 2016 was the only way any Republican could have beaten the most unpopular political figure in 21st-century America; the (bizarre) notion that Republican setbacks in 2018 were a function of Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan not being Trumpy enough; the (delusional) claim that Trump didn't actually lose the presidency in 2020.

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