The Senate picture looks dimmer for Republicans as well. Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin seem way out of reach. Red- and purple-state Democrats (e.g. in Florida, Indiana, Montana) have pulled even or gone ahead in most polls; Democrats in red states (Arizona and Nevada) are running strongly.

This does not mean that Democrats are a lock to win one or both houses. You have to turn out your voters and get through the next 40 days or so without major flubs.

However, given the numbers, the Republicans’ unwillingness to examine what is going so very wrong and make adjustments is rather remarkable. It might be possible to save some seats, yet they are doubling down on losing positions. They might be too nervous about raising the alarm given President Trump’s nonstop cheerleading and intolerance for negative facts, or they also might have lost touch with political reality, caught up in the Trump whirlwind of paranoia and tribalism. Weirdly, though, you still see a batch of right-leaning pundits declare that if they pull Kavanaugh, the Republicans are done for. The base will bolt!

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They’ve already bolted. Maybe it is a grand coincidence, but the decline in GOP polling fortunes in House and Senate races coincides with a huge dropoff in support for Kavanaugh among GOP women. Trump falsely and repeatedly says he won 52 percent of women. He actually won 52 percent of white women (suggesting nonwhites are invisible to him), only 41 percent of women overall. Some of those certainly are stampeding away from the party in House and Senate races as they watch the GOP fight furiously to the death over Kavanaugh, a Beltway elite whose own calendar doesn’t support his self-image of a Boy Scout and teen feminist.

Granted that Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.) was already in the intensive political care ward, but when she won’t tell her suburban constituents (with an outsize percentage of college-educated voters) whether she believes Kavanaugh’s accusers, you can imagine hundreds of new lawn signs going up for her Democratic opponent, Jennifer Wexton.

In North Dakota, Rep. Kevin Cramer (R) might go down as the Todd Akin of the cycle thanks to his remark about Christine Blasey Ford’s complaint of sexual assault. “Nothing evidently happened in it all, even by her own accusation,” he announced. “Again, it was supposedly an attempt or something that never went anywhere.”

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GOP candidates should keep in mind that just about every big political calculation their leadership and conservative strategists made over the past couple of years has been dead wrong. They cannot run on tax cuts for the rich, which predictably turned out to be very unpopular. Their opposition to the Affordable Care Act, specifically the protection for preexisting conditions, is now a cudgel for Democrats. They nevertheless — despite polling and anecdotal evidence of its deleterious effect on races — insist that sticking with Kavanaugh is smart politics. Somehow I don’t see it, but stay tuned.