Jason Sattler

Opinion columnist

A clear majority of American voters rejected President Donald Trump's Republican Party on Tuesday night. Someone should tell the Constitution that.

America's midterm elections revealed nearly every weakness in our democracy that made Trump possible. But they also kept alive the narrow hope we will be able to contain the singular threat he presents to democratic governance, and eventually defeat him.

Almost anywhere you look on the electoral map, Democrats can find a reason to celebrate as a counterweight to each loss they mourn — or at least find a ridiculous irony.

Trump ran a shameless propaganda campaign targeting immigrants, mirrored with actual policies designed to persecute the most vulnerable that ended up even being too racist for Fox News. Yet any success he could claim and use to buoy his party was enabled by inheriting a growing economy from the nation’s first African-American president.

Democratic candidates for the House will likely end up defeating their opponents by a larger margin than any recent Republican “wave” election — but the GOP still has a near stranglehold on the federal government.

House oversight won't stop unethical behavior

A record number of women is now headed to Congress. But Republican control of the Senate and thus the judiciary means an almost 100 percent chance that women will end up with fewer rights than they’ve won over the last 50 years.

California Rep Devin Nunes, Trump’s most eager enabler and Larry to his Moe, won his reelection campaign. Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, as of January will no longer be able to subpoena documents he won’t read to obstruct investigations into a campaign he helped transition into power. So under Democrats we may finally get the House oversight we used to take for granted — including Trump’s tax returns, which could give us some idea of who actually provided the $66 million he put into his 2016 campaign.

But with an even larger majority in the Senate, Trump will be able to fill his administration with even more compromised lackeys determined to make sure his administration is run by the same ethical standards as Trump University. For instance, Trump will surely be able to install an attorney general who’d gladly let this president spray or neuter special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation (if it hasn’t been gutted by the time you read this).

A record number of American voters came to the polls for a midterm election, and automatic voter registration and gerrymandering reform won wherever they were on the ballot. But a majority of Americans stayed home.

More:Election results 2018: Bragging rights for everybody and nobody

Forget the blue wave and behold the purple puddle

Voters rebuke Trump, modestly. At least the House will check his vitriol

Rep. Beto O’Rourke lost his Senate race, but he helped defeat several Texas Republican House members while seeming to single-handedly rebuild the Democratic Party in a state that has lacked one for a generation. Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum won’t be the governor of Florida, but the nation’s key swing state enfranchised 1.5 million voters —the largest victory for ballot access since the Voting Rights Act.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, America’s worst voter suppressors, lost their races for governor. Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who acted as the chief election official and oversaw the purging of over 680,000 voter registrations, now claims to be governor-elect after winning that race by well under 100,000 votes.

Medicaid expansion won in three of the four red states where it was on the ballot (Montana, Nebraska and Utah), and the Affordable Care Act is now unlikely to repealed until at least 2021, if ever. But the Trump administration can continue to chip away at it with requirements and junk plans expressly designed to erode the protections the law is built upon.

With his unrepentant appeals built on bigotry and often-audible dog whistles, Trump tightened his grasp on rural areas, especially in the south. But Republicans lost their governorships in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — three states that were crucial to his 2016 win.

America is rejecting Trump's advances

With so many clouds of despair and so many glimmers of hope, looking at the results of this election can be dizzying. But even Trump should be able to recognize that this nation is rejecting his advances.

Democrats dominated in states that could give Trump a path to reelection. Florida now has a new electorate, and progressives have finally figured out how to slowly counter voter suppression with ballot reforms that are popular with both parties.

Decades of conservative constrictions, built on the concessions in our Constitution to slave owners and smaller states, weakened our immune system enough to allow an opportunistic infection like Trump to invade. Now democracy is striking back.

Who knows what this will all mean and how a lawless demagogue will respond to actual accountability? One thing is sure: Trump will never get better. He will never change. Our only hope that our democracy will. And last night, that began to happen.

Jason Sattler, a writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and host of "The GOTMFV Show" podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @LOLGOP