Back in January, the Pennsylvania congressman Charlie Dent—who co-chairs the Tuesday Group, a caucus of about fifty moderate Republican House members—offered up a bleak analysis of his party’s prospects, in an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon. “I believe that 2018 will be a year that will be analogous to 1994, 2006, and 2010,” Dent said, referring to previous wave election years. “My advice to my colleagues is, You’d better prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”

In the past three months, nothing has happened to suggest that Dent’s analysis was off the mark. To the contrary, with Donald Trump’s approval rating stuck at about forty per cent, and Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, having announced his retirement, many Republicans are looking forward to November’s midterms with quiet dread. On Tuesday, Dent, who had previously announced his intention to leave Congress at the end of this term, added to the G.O.P.’s woes by announcing his intention to resign early, within weeks. That has set up the prospect of another special election for a Republican-held Pennsylvania seat—Dent represents the state’s Fifteenth District—following the dramatic one last month, in which the Democrat Conor Lamb triumphed.

Today the Cook Political Report, a widely quoted authority on congressional politics, rates just a hundred and fifty-six of the four hundred and thirty-five seats in the House as solid Republican seats, whereas it rates a hundred and seventy-nine as solid Democratic seats. In assessing the more competitive races in November’s election, the Report that reckons forty-five are leaning Democratic or are tossups. If the Democratic Party won forty of these seats, which seems perfectly possible, it would gain control of the House. In the Senate, where the G.O.P. has a narrow majority of two, only eight Republican senators are up for reëlection, so the political map is more favorable. But the Cook Report now rates three of these Republican-held Senate races—in Arizona, Nevada, and Tennessee—as tossups.

Further Reading New Yorker writers on the 2018 midterm elections.

The nature of the Republican Party’s problem is obvious. “This midterm election will be a referendum on the President of the United States and his conduct in office—that’s a given,” Dent told Lemon back in January. He also offered some advice to Republicans who are facing competitive races: “You’d better be able to show how you are different, maybe, from the top of the ticket, and show that there is some separation from you and the President.”

Separation? By Tuesday morning, according to a report at Politico, just six House Republicans had summoned up the gumption to support a bill that would grant the special counsel, Robert Mueller, in the event that he is dismissed from his role by Trump and the Justice Department, the right to contest his firing in court. A measly half dozen out of a total of two hundred and thirty-seven Republicans. And one of them was Dent, who doesn’t really count because he’s already on his way out. The entire Republican leadership, including Ryan, insisted that no such bill was necessary.

Last week, the prospects of passing a bill to protect Mueller seemed a bit brighter in the Senate. Two Republican senators—Lindsey Graham and Thom Tillis—joined with Democrats in introducing such a bill, and Chuck Grassley, the head of the Judiciary Committee, indicated his willingness to allow a vote on it in his committee. But, on Tuesday, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, said flatly that he wouldn’t allow the full Senate to have a vote. “I’m the one who decides what we take to the floor,” McConnell told Fox News. “That’s my responsibility as Majority Leader. We’ll not be having this on the floor of the Senate.”

Despite Grassley saying on Wednesday that he would allow the committee vote to proceed anyway, the bill is unlikely to proceed any further. Far from trying to exert at least a sliver of independence from Trump, the Republican high command buckled—just as it has done practically every day since November 8, 2016. But it isn’t just the Party bosses. Far from erupting in outrage at this abject display of subjugation by their leaders, most Republican congressmen and senators went along with it. Some publicly applauded it.

The explanation is straightforward, of course. Most G.O.P. politicians are still frightened silly of Trump, whose approval rating among Republican voters is eighty-nine per cent, according to a new poll by Marist College/NPR/PBS. Despite the President’s unpopularity in the country at large, most elected Republicans still occupy districts containing larger numbers of Trump supporters. Rather than risk incurring the wrath of these voters, most Republicans are content to bow and scrape to the President, virtually regardless of what he does and says.

But while this supine behavior may make sense on the narrow grounds of short-term self-interest, it is leading the Republican Party as a whole to electoral disaster. Even in a corrupt and gerrymandered political system such as this one, elections are ultimately decided at the margins rather than in the party heartlands. And right now everything indicates that in competitive areas of the country the G.O.P. will be crushed. The disaster, if it comes, will be fully deserved.