The conventional wisdom holds that Donald Trump has lost significant support from suburban Republicans since 2016. “If there’s been a Trump Effect,” said David Brooks after Tuesday’s midterms, “it has been to turn suburbs a little bluer.” A Wall Street Journal editorial noted on Wednesday that “Republicans lost the House because they lost significant ground in the suburbs, especially relatively affluent areas with college-educated voters.” It goes on: “The GOP lost House seats in the suburbs of Denver, Dallas, Houston, Des Moines, Minneapolis (two seats), Kansas City, Chicago, Richmond, Phoenix, and even Oklahoma City.”

The idea is that Trump has turned off suburban Republicans with his constitutional divisiveness, unpredictability, and hostility. Numbers don’t lie, and this explanation for Tuesday’s results makes a certain amount of sense but for one thing: Where are all these dismayed ex-Trumpians? And why haven’t we heard from them? In terms of their position on Trump, they are indeed the only group of conservatives from whom we’ve not heard until Tuesday.

We’ve heard from and read countless op-eds by Republicans who despised Trump in 2016 and despise him today. We know all about the Republicans who boarded the MAGA Express early on and never got off. And a string of news stories and opinion pieces over the past two years have caught us up on the formerly Trump-skeptical Republicans who’ve since come around to supporting the president. In fact, the major news outlets have been scolding Republicans consistently since 2016 for shamefully “coming home” to Trump’s Republican Party.

Shameful or not, polling bears this out. A Gallup poll from June showed that 83 percent of Republicans approved of Donald Trump. Among Republican presidents since Eisenhower, Trump is second only to George W. Bush in Republican popularity at the 500-day mark.

So how to account for Tuesday’s poor Republican showing in all those formerly Republican suburbs? Here’s a theory: Suburban Republicans who never liked Trump’s antics (but voted for him with fingers crossed) are perfectly fine seeing a midterm check placed on his administration. If that means the Democrats run the House, so be it. In fact, these affluent Americans would understand that historically markets favor the stability of a divided government. When it comes down to it, these voters—barring some unforeseen enormity—will vote for him in 2020.

It’s just a theory, but it makes more sense than supposing that, in 2016, suburban Republicans could place a wild bet on Trump’s empty circus act only to abandon him after he’s instituted sound conservative policies. In 2016, they overcame his Access Hollywood tape, smears against John McCain, mocking of the disabled, crude attacks on female adversaries, perpetual lies, racist allusions, and stupefying ignorance. In 2018, Donald Trump still conducts himself like Donald Trump, but there’s economic growth hovering near or at 4 percent, unemployment at 3.7 percent, sustained wage increases of more than 3 percent, and a huge rollback of stultifying regulation. Plus, the president has appointed two strong conservatives to the Supreme Court, and there have been no major foreign-policy crises to speak of. These things sit well with conservatives inside and outside of the #MAGA base.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board pointed out that “the share of voters who dislike [Trump] personally but like his policies increased in the past two years.” They find this “extraordinary for a new President,” and say that it “reveals his missed opportunity.” But there’s another way to look at it. If most of that increase comes from voters who liked nothing about Trump in 2016, then he’s gotten them to at least like his policies. (That’s a strange kind of political progress, granted, but these are strange times.) Down the line, that could bode well for Trump. Trumpism isn’t about winning pretty; it’s about winning.

November 2020 is a lifetime away, and something could go terribly wrong for the country over the next two years. But it would likely have to involve more than Donald Trump’s un-presidential conduct for it hurt him at the polls.