I’m not a “fundamentals fundamentalist”; campaign effects do affect outcomes, and there are decent reasons to believe that Donald Trump would underperform fundamentals significantly. But the truth is, Republicans losing the popular vote in six of the last seven elections is as meaningless as Democrats losing the popular vote in seven of the 10 elections from 1952 to 1988 (eight if you count Richard Nixon as the winner of the popular vote in 1960). As a matter of fact, even if we decided elections by coin flips, we’d expect to see runs like this with almost the exact same frequency as we actually see them.

So even if Trump is the Republican nominee, and costs the GOP an election (and it is worth remembering that right now the fundamentals merely point to a very close presidential election), the GOP would probably be in a position to bounce back quickly.

This leads to the real reason that Trump is unlikely to hurt the GOP permanently: In the grand scheme of things, he is really not a big deal. For example, after the Watergate debacle and election of Jimmy Carter, Everett Carll Ladd Jr., wrote: “The Republican party cannot find, outside of the performance of its presidential nominee, a single encouraging indicator of a general sort from its 1976 electoral performance. . . . [W]hat we see manifested here is a secular deterioration of the GOP position. The Democrats have emerged almost everywhere outside the presidential arena as the ‘everyone party.’” Yet four years later, the Republicans won the first of three landslide presidential wins, and 18 years later it began dominating congressional races.