Front-page headlines in both The Washington Post and The New York Times on the Sunday before the midterm elections (at least for those of us who still vote at the polls in the old-fashioned way) loudly proclaimed that the coming contest was to be a referendum on President Trump. “Ah,” said I to myself, “they must be pretty confident that the Democrats are going to do well, or they wouldn’t be saying that.” A Republican success, or even Republicans doing less badly than expected, would have had the economy or local issues to thank, in their view, and certainly not Mr. Trump, whose popularity is axiomatically limited to his fanatical, deplorable “base,” long since written off by the media as “irredeemable”—at least to the extent that it is unavailable to Democrats in search of votes. The Times even added a second piece, by Jeremy W. Peters, headed “g.o.p. Sees Trump’s Playbook as Best Hope in Some Tight Races,” which I doubt that the paper would have done if it were not confident that such a “hope” on the gop’s part could be added to the long list of gop mistakes it has been compiling for the last two years to its own reassurance.

Mr. Peters’s focus was on the First Congressional District of Minnesota, where the Republican candidate, Jim Hagedorn, ended up (barely) winning his seat from the Democrats, an event anticipated by the reporter, who proleptically explained:

The First District, which is 90