After several special elections in which Democrats consoled themselves with having won “moral victories”—by coming closer than recent history would have suggested they would while still losing—Democrats now have real victories to celebrate. And Republicans had better brace themselves.

The Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia didn’t just win the race he was favored to win; he won a landslide. And according to some observers, results in the races below his in Virginia saw a one-party sweep larger than any seen in the state since 1899. That’s not a wave. It’s a tsunami.

In one state, sure. But let’s be clear. If the Republican, Ed Gillespie, had prevailed in the race for VA governor, the general takeaway would have been that Democrats could not capitalize on Donald Trump’s parlous approval ratings and the general low repute in which the GOP is held and that it would now be time to panic.

A Democratic victory this commanding up and down the ticket says exactly the opposite. It says Republicans should panic. It says Democratic enthusiasm is through the roof. It says that pollsters trying to correct for 2016 surveys that undercounted Republican voters overrepresented them in the final weeks of the Virginia campaign and made it look like a race that was probably never close was close.

And what happened will have real-world consequences down the road. Given the portent this represents for the 2018 midterm elections—remember that a GOP win in the same race in 2009 was a harbinger of the Democratic House wipeout in 2010—Republicans considering retirement ahead of the 2018 elections may stop considering and start retiring.

Who wants to run a race for a year he’s going to lose, especially if it appears Donald Trump is a negative for Republicans in his own way analogous to what Barack Obama was for Democrats in 2010? And who wants to stay in the House if his position in the majority is flipped and he must serve as a backbencher in 2019 under the thumb of new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi?

Those 23 Republican House members representing districts won by Hillary Clinton are having a horrendous day today. Remember that Democrats only need 24 seats to flip the House to their control.

Political gravity has reasserted itself. Trump is wildly unpopular. He enrages people in the other party. They mobilized against him and his party in exactly the way they need to mobilize. This is normal. This is the way things work. Trump fans and others who seem to have believed he possessed mystical powers to rewrite political reality are learning otherwise today.

Or perhaps they aren’t learning it. In which case, they will be more likely to learn a far more painful lesson a year from now.