Karen Handel’s narrow victory over Jon Ossoff in last night’s special election in Georgia shows how Republicans can keep their coalition together despite President Donald Trump’s unpopularity. True, Trump was a drag on Handel, who won by four points in a conservative district that Tom Price, now Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, carried by 23 points just six months ago. But in the end, Handel convinced enough Republicans to come home to the party, which she did by shrewdly realizing what unifies the party: anti-anti-Trumpism.

During the campaign, Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state, took care to avoid mentioning Trump’s name whenever possible, referring to him only as “the president.” But as David Weigel reported in the Washington Post, Handel and her political allies ran a tribalist campaign designed to remind Republicans voters that, whatever they might feel about Trump, they hate his opponents more. They relentlessly linked Ossoff to Trump’s critics, from establishment figures like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to outliers such as controversial comedian Kathy Griffin.

“Griffin, whose involvement in the race was limited to one April tweet in support of Ossoff, has now been linked to [Bernie] Sanders and Pelosi in a lineup of ‘childish radicals’ who back the Democrat,” Weigel wrote. “The ad strategy, and the campaign visit from Republicans such as House Speaker Paul Ryan, have had almost nothing to say about what Republicans were working on in Washington. The message was that Republicans would feel terrible if they had to watch Democrats celebrate.”

Handel hit on the magic formula for keeping Republican voters from jumping ship: a politics of negative partisanship taken to its logical extreme, where political identity is based solely on opposition to the other side. This anti-anti-Trumpism is now the glue holding together the otherwise fraying Republican coalition. It’s a weirdly contorted ideology, a counter-punching worldview that shows that the power of hatred can be the strongest force in politics.

Anti-anti-Trumpism is a natural outgrowth of longstanding Republican tendencies toward negative politics, which ramped up in the 1990s when then–House Speaker Newt Gingrich and fellow Republicans made opposing President Bill Clinton the primary feature of their party. But this anti-Democratic and anti-liberal philosophy has been updated today to account for an unpopular Republican president: Whatever you dislike about Trump, rest assured his opponents are far worse.