Deep in the darkest recesses of Donald Trump’s very, very large brain, there is now a nagging feeling that gnaws at his braggadocious narcissism. His own supporters are just not that into him any more.

Not all of them have abandoned him, for sure. The angry old men are still there, screaming their insults at immigrants, the media and anyone else who isn’t an angry old man.

But all those white women – the people he called a majority of women (because the rest of them don’t count to him) – they just ran for the doors that say Trexit.

The exit polls gave Democrats a massive 21-point advantage among women, while Republicans scored just a two-point lead among men. White women split 50-48 for the anti-Trump movement known as Democrats. The only age group that Republicans won were 65 and older – and that was only by one point.

Just two years ago, in those same exit polls, white women gave Trump a nine-point lead over the first woman to hold a major party’s presidential nomination. Married women were pretty divided in 2016, but leaned heavily towards Democrats on Tuesday.

The 2018 election was a story of suburban white female flight away from Trump, shifting a Texas statewide race into nail-biting territory for the first time in more than two decades. You don’t need to be a political consultant to know what a competitive Texas means for the presidential contest that begins almost immediately.

To be sure, this is the point where sensible pundits say that midterms are different from presidential cycles. Obama lost heavily in the 2010 midterms and won re-election handily two years later. But he was, um, sane and normal and cared about reaching voters in the middle. Trump isn’t and doesn’t and shows no capacity to learn.

Sign up to receive the latest US opinion pieces every weekday

So let’s remember the essence of Trump as people speculatively suggest that he could triangulate between the newly elected Democrats controlling the House and the old-school Republicans running the Senate. This is a man who can’t help himself whether it’s blabbing intelligence to the Russians, trashing the woman who accused his US supreme court nominee of sexual assault, or race-baiting Latinos who are the fastest-growing voter bloc in the nation.

No, Trump can’t change, no matter what the voters tell him. He just gets ever more Trumpy, grasping for the last thinning hairs of his far-right conspiracies as they circle the bathroom sink.

Of course there’s enough decent news for Trump to fake himself and his followers into thinking that everything is orange peachy. The 2018 midterms were not a complete tsunami wiping out every standing Republican. The Republican party picked up a few US senate seats on a battlefield that tilted heavily towards them, based on a six-year cycle that coincided with Obama’s re-election year. If that qualifies as a victory, then England can celebrate several World Cup wins since 1966.

Republicans should have sailed to victory at a time of relative peace and prosperity, with unemployment at historic lows and wages rising. But in the House – a truly national contest, unlike the US Senate – voters showed there were clear electoral limits to Trump’s rabidly anti-immigrant racism and stunningly shameless sexism.

It turns out that so-called populism isn’t all that popular. It turns out that suburban women voters don’t much like forcing family separations and slashing healthcare coverage. After reading all those interviews with Trump voters in small-town diners, who knew?

In Florida, where the Democratic disappointment in the Senate and governor’s races was profound, the changes are coming. A state that just decided two contests by less than 100,000 votes also decided to restore voting rights to 1.4 million former felons.

Play Video 2:17 Andrew Gillum concedes Florida governor race to Ron DeSantis on Tuesday night – video

Yes, Ron DeSantis won the governorship despite his close ties to white nationalists. He’ll need many more of the white-sheet gang once those former felons start voting. Meanwhile, Kris Kobach in Kansas, running with the support of similarly racist friends, failed to win the governorship in a state that Trump won by more than 20 points.

Life just changed fundamentally for Donald Trump. He may not know it yet, but he soon will. With his defeat in the House of Representatives, Democrats have ended two years of the Republican party’s determined refusal to conduct any meaningful oversight of his administration.

In place of the far-right Freedom Caucus, there will be multiple investigations into the scandalous loss of thousands of American lives in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Republicans have successfully blocked any serious inquiries into the hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts for disaster relief that could have saved so many lives.

In place of an obsession with repealing Obamacare, there will be serious scrutiny – backed by subpoena power – of Russian interference in the 2016 election, collusion with the Trump campaign and business ties with the Trump Organization.

Donald Trump’s unchecked hold on power has come to an abrupt end, and if his predecessors are any guide, it won’t return any time soon. There will be no more Trump tax cuts for big businesses, and no slashing Trump cuts to social security or healthcare. Still, there will be more Trump judges and possibly more US supreme court nominees.

For many senior Democrats, this is not a wonderful prospect, but the scenario of a wholly controlled Congress wasn’t all that great either. They feared rolling into a 2020 presidential contest with Trump running against a Democratic Congress. That just got a lot harder with the Republican pickups in the Senate. This year’s contests were the prelude to the real battle for both Congress and the White House. Until Democrats win back the presidency, they can’t hope to repair the festering wounds of Trumpism.

It is no coincidence that among the Democrats who won the House there are significantly more women than the old Republican majority. They will be led by the first female speaker, taking control of half of Congress for the second time – which counts as two historic achievements.

So it will be no coincidence when the leading Democratic contenders for the presidency in 2020 – and the right to take the fight directly to Donald Trump – will be female candidates. The 2018 midterms weren’t a blue wave for Democrats, but they were a landslide for women voters and women candidates.

For a man who famously thought he could grab women by the genitals, Donald Trump is about to experience just how painful a squeeze that can be.