It didn’t. On Tuesday evening, Ellmers became the first Republican congressional incumbent to lose a primary in 2016. (The first congressional incumbent to lose was a Pennsylvania Democrat who is under indictment.) And she not only lost; she got blown out by Rep. George Holding. She trails by about 30 points with 95 percent of precincts reporting.

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Trump is now 0 for 1 for congressional endorsements. He's also 0 for 1 in another kind of proxy battle: His endorsement of Ellmers pitted him directly against grass-roots tea party-aligned groups that don’t like him (or Ellmers for that matter). Trump’s endorsement was a last-minute ploy from a candidate facing tough odds late in the primary, and it failed.

Some background: Thanks to court-ordered redistricting, the race pitted two GOP incumbents against each other. Holding decided to challenge Ellmers rather than stay in his old district. And with the help of grass-roots conservative tea party groups who had already committed to taking Ellmers down, he won.

Ellmers hadn’t really been on conservatives' good side for awhile. She was elected in 2010 on a tea party wave, but she alienated some conservatives by holding up a bill that would have banned abortions after 20 weeks and not toeing the party line on immigration reform.

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In March, she became the first female member of Congress to endorse Trump, earning the ire of some tea party conservative groups who have argued — and spent millions on ads saying — that Trump is no conservative. The Club for Growth had been airing ads attacking her since February, and the Tea Party Patriots endorsed Holding a day before the race.

But Ellmers made a bet that Trump would be popular enough to help her survive a challenge from the right. Trump recorded a robocall for Ellmers, and she touted it extensively as one could with a few days left in the primary.

As we wrote Monday:

From Ellmers’s point of view, the tea party groups have become the establishment, and Trump is the anti-establishment. She’s the one bucking the party by supporting the party’s nominee. It’s kind of a microcosm on the presidential race, in which Cruz — a tea partyer if there ever was one — became the establishment candidate simply by virtue of being Trump’s only competition.

Of course, it’s impossible to say whether Trump’s endorsement helped or hurt. As several smart election-watchers have pointed out, the newly drawn district included very little of the territory Ellmers currently represents, and she faced an onslaught of money spent against her. And judging by the outcome, she probably would have lost anyway.

But it’s hard to argue that Trump’s backing helped when a candidate loses by 30. What’s more, this is still a candidate that Trump decided to endorse — possibly in an effort to get back at groups like the Club for Growth for spending millions against him.