“What’s really shitty is that I’m pretty political and well versed on special elections, and I forgot that it was happening at all,” said Ali Akbar, a Republican political operative who moves among the Internet’s pro-Trump crowd. He was referring, of course, to the white-knuckle congressional race in deep-red western Pennsylvania between Republican Rick Saccone and his Democratic challenger, Conor Lamb—a race that came and went Tuesday with Saccone apparently losing by a few hundred votes. It is somewhat surprising, then, that the Saccone-Lamb showdown didn’t make much of an impression in MAGA-land. Akbar, a veteran of several congressional campaigns, described the narrow gap in the latest polling as a shock: “I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a race! Oh, we’re losing. Oh, a 20-point gap?’”

To many Trump supporters across the country, Saccone’s travails, much like the recent spate of prickly Republican experiences in post-2016 special elections, appeared to have come out of nowhere. Polling right before election day put Saccone neck and neck with Lamb, a moderate Democrat, in a district that Trump won by 20 points in 2016. (One Monmouth poll released Monday showed Lamb six points ahead.) Part of the problem was Saccone’s own lack of chutzpah—even his fellow Republicans described him as a poor fund-raiser (Lamb has personally out-raised him by 500 percent) who ignored outside advice, and internal polling showed him to be wildly unpopular in the district he hoped to represent. Reports of his vulnerability prompted the G.O.P. to drop over $10 million into the race and to send in the big guns: Mike Pence, Ivanka Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump Jr., and the president himself, who appeared there twice—once over the weekend, at a rally where the right embraced his newly minted campaign slogan.

“Everyone’s shit-talking this candidate, because he’s a shit candidate.”

Donald Trump’s presence may have tilted the scales, a Pennsylvania political operative with close ties to MAGAworld told me on Monday, before the results started coming: “There’s a lot of people who, if you asked last week, they were writing off Saccone going, ‘Yeah, that guy’s toast,’ and trying to distance themselves. They’re now saying that the Trump rally may have given him enough of a shot in the arm to make it competitive.” But the right-wing media remained largely unimpressed. Few, if any, of the articles dedicated to Trump’s rally on sites like Breitbart and the Daily Caller attempted to extol the virtues of Saccone. Perhaps even more surprising: Breitbart hardly touched Lamb, and the Drudge Report barely dedicated space to the race at all, except to criticize Saccone’s malaise. It seemed that just as the president needed them—when a flipped district could throw his mandate into question, and further energize Democrats as they prepare for a blue wave in 2018—the group that helped to elect him went quiet.

Even Trump’s star power, which drew crowds in rural Pennsylvania, didn’t rouse his die-hard supporters across the country, as the Alabama Senate race or the Georgia special election did. “I don’t think this is really resonating that much in Trumpworld,” said Kurt Schlichter, a frequent Fox News guest and Townhall columnist. When I texted Mike Cernovich, conspiracy theorist and king of the MAGA faction of the Internet, to get his thoughts before the election, he was initially confused: “I don’t even know who is running or that there was a race!”

In hindsight, it’s easy to pinpoint where Republicans went wrong with Saccone. Aside from his lack of charisma, which even the president privately noted, the Pennsylvania operative told me that Saccone had been backed by the state’s machine politics, propelling him past two candidates preferred by the national party, potentially at the expense of Trump’s hardcore base. The fact that Saccone reportedly made no effort to reach out to these voters, either by running a get-out-the-vote operation or even by attempting to dress the part, didn’t help either. “Everyone’s shit-talking this candidate, because he’s a shit candidate,” Akbar said. “They posted some pictures this morning from his [social-media] account, of him touring coffee shops, and people are just so uninterested in him. I was looking at the rally last night, and this guy is wearing French cuffs in Pennsylvania! You need to take off your jacket, roll up your sleeves. It looks stupid.”