AS A rule, supporters of the Republican Party tend to dislike losing elections to Democrats. Bear this in mind as opinion polls emerge, suggesting that Donald Trump may have peaked as a front-runner among Republican presidential hopefuls.

The Trump surge was always likely to slow at some point because most Republican activists—for all their bluster about the two parties’ ruling elites being as bad as each other—would rather win the 2016 election than see President Hillary Clinton sitting in the Oval Office. Though Mr Trump for a while seemed to defy the laws of political gravity, surviving gaffes and rows that would have brought other candidates to earth, most conservatives already knew that the splenetic property tycoon is unelectable (thanks to the size of the field, he has routinely led with the backing of just one in four Republicans).

That does not mean that party grandees can relax, for they have not seen the last of the anger that has fuelled the Trump run. Fed-up grassroots conservatives remain sure that Barack Obama is bent on destroying their country and cannot understand why Republican leaders have not done more to thwart his agenda despite controlling both chambers of Congress. They are reluctant to accept that governing in a large, messy democracy involves compromise, or that the concerns of hard-core conservatives do not always enjoy majority support. They are quick to believe that their elites have been bought by corrupt special interests. Mr Trump has sought to fuel those suspicions, boasting that his cash allows him to boss politicians of both parties around. His particular genius has been to offer cynical voters not reform, but his own services as a leader too rich and clever to be suborned.

Some Trump fans simply relish the skunk-at-a-picnic aspects of his presidential bid. They do not care that his policy platform is a mess of boastfulness and absurdity (his plan for Islamic State: “We go in, we knock the hell out of ’em, we take the oil”). They cheer every time Senator This or Governor That—not to mention the mainstream media—is left spluttering by his outbursts. At the RedState Gathering, a conservative forum held in Atlanta from August 6th-8th after the first televised presidential debate in Cleveland, a dismaying number of activists saw nothing wrong with Mr Trump’s repeated assertion that the Mexican government deliberately sends criminals north across the border, and gets away with it because American politicians are “stupid”. Nor did activists quibble with his fantastical solution: a border wall, for which a President Trump would make Mexico pay.

Though nine presidential candidates addressed the RedState forum, Mr Trump’s invitation was torn up after he launched a series of attacks on Megyn Kelly, a Fox News presenter and debate co-host. Ms Kelly had asked him in Cleveland whether his record of calling women who cross him “fat pigs” and “dogs” might help Democrats paint Republicans as anti-woman. On the night, an audience of 24m Americans watched Mr Trump offer a snarling response about political correctness. Over the next few days he seemed—to many ears—to suggest that Ms Kelly’s thinking had been clouded by menstruation.

Yet a straw poll of activists at RedState suggests that what really upset them was Mr Trump’s disloyalty. They were aghast that, in the debate’s opening moments, Mr Trump declined to pledge his support for whomever becomes the Republican nominee and then refused to rule out an independent run for the presidency, explaining that this would give him “a lot of leverage”.

An ex-cop who owns a security business in Dahlonega, Georgia, recalled voting for the third-party candidacy of another billionaire populist, Ross Perot, in the presidential election of 1992, only to watch Bill Clinton win the White House for the Democrats and deny George H.W. Bush a second term. Vowing never to make that mistake again, the former policeman said he is now looking for a Republican candidate who is very conservative “but electable”. The ex-cop, like many of the activists gathered in Atlanta, favours Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a hardliner who fired up the crowd by denouncing his Republican colleagues in Congress as a self-serving “Washington cartel”. A county official from Mobile, Alabama, predicted that: “People are angry enough with what is happening in the country that they’ll vote for Ted Cruz.”

To be fair, RedState gatherings attract a particularly flinty sort of conservative. In other forums, more pragmatic candidates have received good reviews for their first TV debate performances, among them Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Carly Fiorina, the former boss of Hewlett-Packard, a technology firm (who dominated a separate debate for candidates who did not poll well enough to make the main show). But Republicans of all stripes agree that the 2016 campaign is unfolding in an angry country. They give credit to Mr Trump for tapping into a mood of grievance, and suggest that a clever conservative can now harness that emotion to unify a broad electoral coalition on the right.

We want our country back

That is too glib. Mr Trump’s most loyal supporters—white men without college degrees—have much to be cross about. They have lost economic and social power, thanks partly to global competition and automation but also to feminism and civil rights. All politicians know they cannot ignore the pain of those who have lost their jobs. Mr Trump offers simple, dazzling solutions, involving fines for firms that ship jobs abroad, or promises to use his dealmaking savvy to transform trade relations with China. But some voter anger—notably towards professional women and non-whites—is illegitimate. Strikingly, when RedState activists were read some of the furious e-mails sent to protest against Mr Trump’s exclusion, many called Ms Kelly a whore or a lesbian and called the man in the White House a “nigger”. Ugly forms of rage are in the air, and will survive a Trump slump. For Republicans seeking to craft nationwide majorities, anger is also a trap.