All of these losers threw thunderbolts on immigration. Taylor aired a blistering ad attacking DeWine as soft on the issue, with images of shadowy figures scrambling across a road. Blankenship, who served a year in prison for his role in a mine explosion that killed 29 workers, went the furthest, with an 11th-hour ad that accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of creating “millions of jobs for China people” and accepting “tens of millions of dollars” from “his China family.” That language, stripped of any remaining veil of nativism, referred to the Taiwanese heritage of McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, Trump’s transportation secretary.

The defeats of these candidates showed that even in the Trump-era GOP condemning immigrants most vociferously is no guarantee of primary success. But even more telling was how aggressively the more mainstream, winning candidates sought to coopt these arguments. If there was a major GOP candidate in these primaries who did not loudly declare their support for building Trump’s border wall, I didn’t see it. Likewise, every major GOP candidate pledged to crack down on so-called “sanctuary cities,” which limit their cooperation with federal immigration-enforcement officials, and several pledged to constrict legal immigration.

Mike Braun, the business executive who beat two Republican House members for the Senate nomination in Indiana, succinctly expressed this new conservative catechism in one ad: “We must build the wall, ban sanctuary cities, and put an end to chain migration.” Even in West Virginia, Morrisey and Representative Evan Jenkins, who finished second, apparently raised no public objections to Blankenship’s broadsides against “China people.”

Perhaps most dramatic was DeWine’s response to Taylor’s assault on his immigration record. As a U.S. senator from Ohio, DeWine in 2006 had supported the bipartisan immigration-reform bill that passed the Senate, which provided a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants. But rather than defend his past position against Taylor, DeWine aired his own ad declaring he “is fighting for President Trump’s travel ban that will keep us safe and punishing illegal sanctuary cities.”

These maneuvers confirmed a pattern established in earlier Trump-era Republican contests. In last year’s Republican gubernatorial primary in Virginia, Ed Gillespie narrowly beat anti-immigration firebrand Corey Stewart. But during the general election, Gillespie—who years earlier, as the Republican National Committee chairman, had championed a more inclusive party—swerved toward nativist themes, with ads darkly warning of threats from the Central American gang MS-13.

Likewise, Representative Martha McSally, the Republican-establishment favorite in August’s upcoming Arizona Senate primary, has moved to preempt two immigration hard-liners to her right—Kelli Ward and former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio—by co-sponsoring legislation from House conservatives. Their bill would not only fund the wall and stiffen enforcement against undocumented immigration, but it would also cut legal immigration by roughly 40 percent, according to some estimates.*