With general election now underway, segments of the professional commentariat and the anti-Trump right are jointly fostering a conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton would be losing, perhaps badly, if any of Donald Trump’s 16 Republican primary contestants had managed to defeat him this spring.

Kasich would be up 10 now. — Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) August 4, 2016

For Republicans, this is both a tragic and bracing conclusion—tragic for the opportunity lost; bracing for the implication that underneath the necrotic tissue of Trumpism you’ll find a mostly healthy political organism.

For political writers, it’s a remembrance of things past but hopefully not lost—a time when presidential campaigns were exciting yet value-neutral competitions between teams with familiar players.

Against almost anyone else Clinton would be behind and we'd be spending at least half our time mocking her. But since Trump is a buffoon... — Stuart Rothenberg (@StuPolitics) August 11, 2016

These are comforting notions to the people who hold them. Conservatives have dedicated their livelihoods to an ideology that’s now under threat. They have a rooting interest in portraying Clinton as an unrightful victor, like a defendant acquitted on a technicality. Political journalists, meanwhile, would like to make bigger issue of Clinton’s cynicism about the press. They are more comfortable writing and talking about liberals vs. conservatives than about Democrats vs. white ethno-nationalists. This election is frustrating the media’s preference for, and comfort with, two-handed journalism.

But their shared thesis itself is, at best, a deeply underdeveloped one. Clinton may have lost an election against a different candidate; she’s by no means guaranteed to win this one. But to assume it was Republicans’ to lose, you must first blind yourself to quantitative facts and strong assumptions about our politics that weaken the idea fatally. Yes, Trump is a uniquely bad candidate. But for reasons internal and external to their party, this election was never going to be a cinch for the GOP. To believe otherwise is to ignore the root causes of the party’s current illness.

