Historically speaking, Democrats delivered a thoroughly average result in their first round as Trump’s opposition. Going all the way back to the Civil War, there were only two instances when a new party seized the presidency but didn’t lose seats in the House during their first midterm elections: Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 (during the Great Depression), and President George W. Bush in 2002 (in the shadow of the 9/11 terrorist attacks). Even including these outliers, the average attrition during a party’s inaugural midterms is 35 House seats; excluding these two exceptions, the average loss is 41. Regardless of which number we run with, Trump could end up performing better than average in preserving his party’s influence in the House. He performed much better than his last two Democratic predecessors: Bill Clinton lost control of both chambers in the 1994 midterm elections. Barack Obama saw historic losses in the House in 2010, and lost seats in the Senate as well — the most sweeping congressional reversal in 62 years.

Yet, not only did Trump suffer far less attrition than Obama or Clinton in the House, his party will gain in the Senate. This may not be surprising given the slanted map against Democrats. It is also somewhat typical overall: Between 1862 and 2014, the president’s party picked up seats in the Senate during their first midterms 56 percent of the time, lost seats 37 percent of the time and broke even once. In other words, there did not seem to be a thorough rebuke of Trump. In fact, there was little exceptional in the results at all, beyond the fact that they were so very normal.