At an August rally in West Virginia for Patrick Morrisey, the crowd at the Charleston Civic Center was largely there to see Donald Trump. The president had flown in to give Morrisey, the state’s attorney general, a boost in his attempt to unseat Democratic Senator Joe Manchin in the midterms this fall. Morrisey gave Trump a grateful look as he strode on stage, declaring, “We love you, Mr. President!” In the midst of his stump speech, he even coined a Trump-esque epithet for his opponent: “dishonest liberal Joe Manchin.”

Trump played some of his greatest hits (“the people of West Virginia can’t stand winning so much”) to a rapturous audience. Whether he succeeded in generating enthusiasm for Morrisey, a round-shouldered man with glasses who stood a half-head shorter than the president, was another question. One attendee, John Shannon, who wore a Trump 2020 hat and was angling to shake hands with a Fox News personality, told me he needed to “do some more research” before he could say who he’d back in the Senate race.

That Trump is needed in West Virginia to boost his party’s Senate candidate is indicative of the problems Republicans face in 2018, even in so-called Trump Country. Two years ago, Republicans absolutely dominated West Virginia. The Mountain State gave Trump his second-biggest percentage of the vote (67.9 percent) in the country after Wyoming, and his second-biggest margin of victory (41.7 percentage points), also after Wyoming. Republicans that year retained majorities in both chambers of the state legislature and successfully defended all three congressional seats.

Now, however, Manchin has a narrow but tangible lead over Morrisey. In southern West Virginia, Richard Ojeda, an Army veteran who voted for Trump but is running for Congress as a pro-pot, pro-labor Democrat, has made a competitive race out of one of the Trumpiest districts in the country. Teachers in West Virginia won national attention in late winter for a strike that cascaded into similar actions in Kentucky, Oklahoma, and beyond, and their actions have been injecting energy into state legislative races.

It’s tempting to see in these events a blue wave that’s poised to break over the country, including in states that went hard for Trump two years ago. But that’s not what’s happening in West Virginia. If Manchin successfully wins re-election in November, it will be precisely because he prevented his campaign from turning into a referendum on the president.