Add to the success of these Republican women the crossover to the GOP of black, Hispanic and Asian voters. Democrats argue these gains are small. But the opening for the political optimism of Reaganesque (now Trumpian) private-sector job opportunity is too big to ignore.

Conventional wisdom holds, with reason, that the Republican Party is a dodo bird in California and New York. But Democrats lost House seats to the dodos in both states.

The strongest evidence that the GOP won’t be spending a generation in any post-Trumpian wilderness is the National Conference of State Legislatures’ map of partisan legislative control. It shows a lot of red now, notably total control in four states where the Democrats hoped to flip at least one chamber—Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina—as well as such important battlegrounds as Georgia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona and New Hampshire.

Many of these Republican legislatures will be drawing congressional district maps next year. New York and California will each lose a House seat, the latter for the first time ever.