THE most shocking part of the cyclone that hit Donald Trump’s presidential campaign on October 7th was not the contents of a videotape in which the Republican presidential nominee was heard boasting of being able to get away with sexual assault. To anyone who has followed the presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s misogyny and alleged habit of groping women were old news. More troubling, for what it said about the moral condition of America, was a profound uncertainty among pollsters and pundits about what effect, if any, the scandal might have on Mr Trump’s poll numbers.

The tape, which was discovered in the archives of an NBC entertainment show, “Access Hollywood”, and leaked to the Washington Post, was foul. It opened with Mr Trump, in conversation with Billy Bush, a television presenter who happens to be a nephew of George H.W. Bush, describing his attempt to sleep with a television presenter: “I did try and fuck her. She was married…I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there.”

Billy Bush, who has arguably had a bigger impact on the election than his cousin Jeb, whom many Republicans expected to win it, then spots an attractive television actor awaiting Mr Trump. “I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her,” says the Republican nominee, silky smooth. “When you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

It is hard for a presidential candidate to recover from such a revelation. Yet Mr Trump’s supporters have strong stomachs. When their champion called Mexicans rapists they cheered. When he refused to disavow the endorsement of a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, they shrugged it off. His support shrank a bit, it is true, after he spent a week in August denigrating the grieving parents of a dead war hero; but the setback proved temporary. What difference could some decade-old “locker-room banter”, as Mr Trump called his comments, possibly make?

Not much, among the faithful. Polls sampled after the tape was aired show his share of the vote has only slightly dipped, to around 39%, which suggests 60m Americans are still planning to vote for him. At his bear-pit rallies, men in “Trump that bitch” and “I wish Hillary had married OJ” T-shirts say they do not give a damn about any tape (and whatever is on it, they add, Bill Clinton did worse). Yet such devotees, 90% of whom are white and 60% of whom did not attend college, are not on their own numerous enough to give Mr Trump victory in an increasingly diverse and educated America. And the response of almost every other category of voter to his political freak show, of which the tape was merely the latest sordid act, is revulsion.

As The Economist went to press Hillary Clinton had jumped to a lead of more than five points in the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls. That may well increase; a couple of polls that gathered data after the tape aired put her up by 11 points. The Democratic nominee has a lead in almost all the battleground states Mr Trump would need to win to bag the requisite 270 electoral-college votes, including Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. For that matter, she is also ahead in North Carolina and level-pegging in Arizona, two of the states Mr Trump’s predecessor, Mitt Romney, won in 2012. An election predictor built by Nate Silver, a data journalist and revered prognosticator, gives Mrs Clinton an 87% chance of becoming America’s first woman president.

That looked on the cards even before the cyclone hit. Through most of September Mr Trump’s numbers were climbing; he closed to within a point or two of Mrs Clinton. But after a loutish performance in the first television debate, on September 26th, which was watched by a record-breaking audience of 84m, combined with revelations that he had bullied a beauty queen with bulimia and perhaps paid no income tax for almost two decades, his advance stalled. By the time the tape was leaked, Mrs Clinton had a three-point lead, and many Republican politicians had concluded Mr Trump could not win.

The hardening pre-tape conviction that Mr Trump was doomed helps explain why over 25 Republican federal legislators and state governors abruptly rescinded their endorsements of Mr Trump shortly after it aired. It was not only, as many claimed, that their consciences were pricking them. Many are fighting tough re-election battles which their association with Mr Trump has made much tougher. An analysis by Sarah Binder of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, of the members of the House of Representatives who shelved Mr Trump suggests the propensity to ditch him rises rapidly with the share of the vote in their districts that Barack Obama won in 2012.

Very weak and ineffective

In distancing himself from Mr Trump, John McCain, an Arizona senator, wrote that “He alone bears the burden of his conduct and alone should suffer the consequences.” Really? The Republican Party nominated Mr Trump with a bumper vote in the primaries. Almost all its leaders endorsed him, as Mr McCain did, ignoring overwhelming evidence that he was a charlatan. The racism, misogyny and threats of violence that peppered his speeches were not merely apparent before he won their party’s nomination, they were his means of winning it. What explains that moral failure?

The answer starts with the Republican voters. In the dowdier parts of white America, a combination of economic and cultural anxieties has caused real misery. That cannot be dismissed. Yet it has also exacerbated deep chauvinisms without which the explosive success of Mr Trump’s racist dog-whistling and the seething mood of his lily-white crowds cannot easily be explained. Cynical partisans, especially the conservative talk-radio hosts from whom millions of older whites get their views, made money fuelling those prejudices (see Schumpeter). By pushing a form of “common sense” conservatism that demonised immigrants, liberals and scroungers, and throwing in a good dose of conspiracy theory, they gave them a voice. Mr Trump’s success was built on his understanding that no Republican leader subscribed to this guff to anything like the same degree as millions of Republican voters did, and that that created an opening for an unscrupulous demagogue.

Mr Trump’s lies—that Barack Obama is a Muslim, say, or that global warming is a Chinese con—are the sorts of thing his audience has been hearing on the radio and reading on blogs for years. So are his insults; Mr Trump’s mocking impression of a disabled reporter was in essence an attack on the hated mainstream media and the culture of political correctness his supporters loathe. Republican leaders were blind-sided by the gulf revealed between themselves and a large portion of their voters and feared widening it.

There were exceptions to this spinelessness. Ben Sasse, a senator from Nebraska, took an early and trenchant stand against Mr Trump. John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, refused to attend Mr Trump’s coronation at the Republican convention even though it was in his state. The semi-retired Mr Romney and Jeb Bush were openly critical. But as the Trump train kept rolling, most of the party’s leaders shrugged and wrapped themselves in a predictable partisan excuse: Mrs Clinton is worse.

More striking than the recent denunciations of Mr Trump is the fact that the majority of elected Republicans are still on board the train. Mr Trump can take some credit for that, having steadied their nerves with a competent showing in the second televised debate, in St Louis, Missouri on October 9th. It was a disgraceful performance. Mr Trump held a press conference, shortly before the debate, flanked by three women who claim to have been abused by Bill Clinton. Continuing the attack, he sought to shift attention from questions about the tape by telling Mrs Clinton that, if he was elected president, he would have her thrown “in jail” over her use of a private e-mail server while secretary of state.

Mr Trump’s followers are convinced that the e-mail affair amounts to a set of crimes that should see Mrs Clinton in a cell. Never mind that the issue has been investigated by the State Department’s independent watchdog and the FBI, which released a 250-page report last month to support its argument that Mrs Clinton was guilty of nothing except carelessness; Mr Trump said he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate her—and the verdict, he made clear, would not be in doubt.

With this unprecedented threat he continued to subvert America’s democracy, and also delighted Republicans beyond his core support. It is not only those who turn up at Mr Trump’s rallies who like an aggressive conspiracy theory. Mainstream Republicans have been spinning them about the Clintons for decades—another reason why they have found Mr Trump’s calumnies easier to swallow than they should.

There have been no further renunciations of Mr Trump. Indeed, on October 11th, the other senator from Nebraska, Deb Fischer, who had previously called on him to quit, said she would vote for him anyhow. Most Republican congressmen fear renouncing him might cost them his supporters—perhaps permanently splitting the party. They also fear it would depress Republican turnout at the general election, which would hurt them in the congressional races on the ballot.

If Mrs Clinton won by a decent margin, the Democrats would probably capture the Senate; there are 24 Republicans up for re-election, and the Democrats need a net gain of only four seats. A majority in the Senate would allow a second President Clinton to get her cabinet and judicial nominations approved. But the real prize, because it would also enable her to pass legislation, would be if the Democrats could take the House of Representatives, where all 435 seats are up for grabs, and the Republicans are defending a much bigger majority.

For that to happen, the Democrats would need to improve their current tally by 30 seats. That looks a stretch, given how few competitive seats gerrymandering has left. But if Mrs Clinton won by a landslide it might be possible. Staving off such a defeat is an imperative for Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House. He has put as much distance between himself and his party’s nominee for the Oval Office as he can without formally unendorsing him.

Talking to congressional candidates on October 10th, Mr Ryan announced that he would no longer defend Mr Trump and in effect invited them to act accordingly. “You all need to do what’s best for you in your district,” he was reported to have said. This suggests Republican congressmen are free to explicitly bash Mr Trump.

The nominee’s response was vicious and highly wrought. In one of his characteristic tweet storms he accused Mr Ryan of being “very weak and ineffective”. “Disloyal R’s are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary. They come at you from all sides,” he wrote.

What could he hope to achieve by caving in the roof on his own party? Perhaps he has concluded that rallying his angry, mistrustful troops against one last enemy, the party itself, is his best means to a respectable defeat. Perhaps he is burnishing his credentials for some post-electoral enterprise; it has long been rumoured that he means to launch a conservative media company targeted at the “alt-right”, a fringe of racists and conspiracy theorists, after the election. Perhaps he is merely raging and, as ever, out of control.

It seems he means to rage on. In recent days, while castigating Mr Ryan, he has advised a white crowd in Pennsylvania that “other communities”—by which he meant black people—were planning to steal the election; claimed the debates commission was “rigged”; and accused the Justice Department and Mrs Clinton of “collusion and corruption of the highest order”. Mr Trump’s campaign, it seems, is going to have the end it deserves, nasty, brutish and harmful to America. The next month already feels too long.