Shortly after news outlets began officially projecting that Republicans would lose control of the House of Representatives Tuesday night, I emailed the GOP strategist Brad Todd to ask why he thought his party had lost.

“Lost?” he responded, almost immediately. “What are you talking about? We may have our largest Senate majority in history.”

He was overstating things a bit, but his sentiment was not unique. At the end of an ugly 2018 campaign season, Republican strategists told me the election results were unlikely to prompt much introspection within their party—let alone a course correction. Far from the blue-wave repudiation of Donald Trump that some were predicting earlier this year, the midterms yielded decidedly mixed results for the president’s party.