One of the few people to really see Donald Trump coming was the University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales, who warned way back in 2011 that American politics was going the way of his native Italy, that we could easily produce our own version of Silvio Berlusconi, and that Trump was an obvious candidate to bottle the celebrity-populist-outsider cocktail.

So Zingales’s advice to Democrats after their 2016 defeat carried more weight than the average act of punditry. On the evidence of Berlusconi’s many victories and rare defeats, he argued, the best way to beat Trump was to do exactly what many liberals understandably didn’t want to do — to essentially normalize him, to treat him “as an ordinary opponent” rather than an existential threat, to focus on issues rather than character debates, to deny him both the public carnival and the tone of outraged hysteria in which his brand of politics tends to thrive.

I think that many prominent elected Democrats have tried to follow this advice. The spirit of the activist Resistance is certainly visible in Congress, but legislatively the party’s leaders have mostly battled Trump the way they would have battled any Republican, and around the country the party’s successful nominees have focused as much on unpopular aspects of the Republican agenda as on Trump’s various grotesqueries.

The reasonable Democratic hope has been that grass-roots and online anti-Trump fervor will drive their base’s turnout, even as the official faces of the party reassure swing voters that they’re voting for a check on Trumpism, not a radical impeach-or-bust movement. And for the first year of the Trump era this strategy seemed to be working for the Democrats, with a handful of notable electoral triumphs and a generic ballot lead that promised a 2018 wave.