Congressional Republicans are whistling to keep their spirits up. After Tuesday’s special election in Ohio’s Twelfth Congressional District, where the Democrat, Danny O’Connor, came very close to carrying an area where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by two to one, the Republican National Committee released a mocking ad with the message “Moral victories don’t get a vote in Congress.” Elsewhere, the National Republican Senatorial Committee—the group whose job it is to get Republicans elected to the Senate, and keep them there—hailed the victory of the rising star Josh Hawley, in Missouri’s Republican primary, saying, “We can’t wait to see you defeat @Clairecmc”—Claire McCaskill, the Democratic incumbent.

But, behind the scenes, the mood among G.O.P. leaders is surely a lot darker. Tuesday’s results confirmed that the Party is facing the prospect of losing control of the House of Representatives on November 6th, while the outcome of the battle for the Senate is highly uncertain. The results also highlighted fissures in the Trump-G.O.P. voting coalition, particularly the aversion to Donald Trump among some affluent, educated Republicans. These fissures are getting wider with every Trump tweet, rant, and insult.

Just as worrying for Republican strategists: it’s hard to see any way to change course. Confining Trump to a Trappist monastery for three months might help a bit. But it might not: much of the damage has already been done.

Trump, obviously, would never admit to any of this. “As long as I campaign and/or support Senate and House candidates (within reason), they will win!” he tweeted on Wednesday. This was a reference to his appearance in Ohio, last Saturday, alongside Troy Balderson, the Republican candidate in the Ohio Twelfth, who eked out a victory by fewer than sixteen hundred votes. But the President’s claim to have swung the election in Balderson’s favor is dubious. The “granular results show Balderson probably owes his win to a late endorsement ad cut by GOP Gov. John Kasich, not a late rally by President Trump,” David Wasserman, of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, noted this week. “Balderson held onto a solid nine-point margin in wealthy suburban Delaware County, Kasich’s base, where turnout was high. But turnout was abysmally low in the district’s most pro-Trump rural counties.”

Wasserman’s analysis runs counter to the view that all Trump has to do is turn up in a certain district or state and hold one of his rallies to make his blue-collar white voters, a good number of whom are ex-Democrats, turn out in droves to support whichever Republican candidate he endorses. Balderson is an unremarkable Republican state senator who had previously served in the state assembly. Even as he embraced Trump in the days before the election, many of the President’s supporters seem to have decided to stay home.

This may reflect apathy, distaste for a milquetoast Republican, or even rising disaffection with Trump. It is often remarked that his base is rock solid. But is that still true? The latest poll from Quinnipiac University indicated that Trump’s support among white voters without a college degree fell from fifty-seven per cent in June to forty-nine per cent in July. And his disapproval rating went from thirty-six per cent to forty-seven per cent.

Perhaps this poll was an outlier; possibly its findings reflected a temporary response to Trump’s pusillanimous performance in Helsinki with Vladimir Putin. It’s hard to know. But there is no such doubt about how Trump turns off many affluent, college-educated Republicans. You could see this in Delaware County, a suburb of Columbus, where the median family income is more than a hundred thousand dollars, far above the national average. Even though Balderson carried the district handily after Kasich’s endorsement, the G.O.P. share of the vote fell by twenty percentage points compared with the 2016 election.

“This is all of a piece with the intuition nationally that college-educated whites are turning away from the Republican Party in reaction to Donald Trump’s presidency,” Sean Trende, an analyst at RealClearPolitics, wrote on Wednesday. In 2016, Trende was one of the few commentators to suggest that Trump could win. He says that Tuesday’s “results were fully consistent with a Democratic wave in the house washing up on our shores in November.”

Many of this year’s competitive House races are in suburban areas, where Trump’s presence looms large and unfavorably. On Thursday, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, which is based at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, changed its ratings on a number of these types of contests, moving Michigan’s Eleventh District, New Jersey’s Eleventh District, and Pennsylvania’s Seventeenth District from “toss-up” to “leans Democratic.” It shifted another suburban seat, Kansas’s Third District, from “leans Republican” to “toss-up.”

The ratings outfit took note of the primary elections in the state of Washington, which operates a system in which all of the candidates in a specific race appear on the same ballot and the top two progress to the general election. Over all, Republican vote shares were disappointing. In the Fifth District, for example, which encompasses the city of Spokane and many of its suburbs, Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who is the chair of the House Republican Conference, got just 47.8 per cent of the vote, barely a point more than her Democratic challenger, Lisa Brown.

Republican strategists are well aware of these trends. According to the Washington Post, White House aides are now “mapping out plans for the fall that would offer a variety of options to Republican candidates, including visits by the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump to blue states and presidential tweets to bolster red-state allies.”

Further Reading New Yorker writers on the 2018 midterm elections.

Evidently, the thinking is to use Trump to boost turnout in areas where he is popular, but to keep him away from latte-sipping Republicans in the ’burbs. This may sound like a reasonable idea, but it’s impractical. There’s no keeping him away from anywhere. Whenever he says or does anything, he dominates the media agenda nationwide, and he winds up on televisions, computer screens, and smartphone screens. It’s fanciful to imagine that he could spend September and October whipping up his diehard supporters at rallies in places such as Charleston, West Virginia, and Bismarck, North Dakota, without entering the consciousness of Republican voters in the areas surrounding Chicago, Columbus, and Philadelphia.

The G.O.P. can’t escape the old truism that midterm elections are largely referendums on the President. With a lightning rod like Trump in the White House, the saying may apply doubly this year. Of course, things could change between now and Election Day. But, with less than three months to go, it’s looking like House Speaker Paul Ryan and roughly three dozen other House Republicans knew what they were doing when they announced that they would retire instead of seek reëlection this year.