If there has been one thing missing from analyses of the 2018 midterms, it’s been a Republican postmortem.

Part of the reason for this is that the full extent of the Democrats’ victory in flipping control of the House wasn’t clear on Election Night. There’s also the fact that Republicans did well in a number of key statewide races and that the GOP wound up increasing its majority in the Senate.

Though President Donald Trump declared victory in a post-election press conference that is now remembered for CNN’s Jim Acosta refusing to give up the microphone after his latest attempt to trounce the president, there’s no sugarcoating the fact that the loss of 39 House seats was a serious defeat. That’s especially true when you consider that most of those losses came in competitive suburban districts because both female and younger voters went heavily for the Democrats this year.