For conservatives, the 2018 midterm-election results are a Rorschach test. To some, the results demonstrated that the Democratic Party’s appeal has its limits, and the GOP under Donald Trump is more popular than its detractors are willing to admit. To others, the elections were a disaster that heralded the end of the legislative phase of Trump’s presidency and the recapitulation of the Democratic Party. There is almost no agreement among these two conservative factions about what conditions the 2018 elections will yield, with one exception: The GOP in Congress in 2019 will be a much more pro-Trump party, even if it’s also a smaller one.

Just as the 2010 elections saw the virtual extinction of Blue Dog Democrats, the Republican lawmakers who were most exposed to the voters’ wrath on Tuesday were the Republicans in swing districts who appealed to more centrist electorates. Those “moderate Republicans” were most likely to lose their races. As a result, the conservative movement’s face-saving response to the GOP’s relegation to minority status is elation.

“The squishy members who lost their races were the ones that didn’t embrace that conservative agenda,” Club for Growth President David McIntosh insisted. Conservative activist Brent Bozell agreed. “Republicans shed a lot of dead weight last night,” he said. Announcing his campaign to assume leadership of the truncated GOP conference, Rep. Jim Jordan insinuated that his party’s electoral troubles are the result of insufficient zealotry in defense of Donald Trump. “We should have run closer to the president,” Jordan said.

This verdict is not universally applicable. In the case of the historically Republican 1st congressional district in South Carolina, for example, the GOP’s problem wasn’t running away from Donald Trump. Just the opposite.

On paper, Mark Sanford was the model conservative lawmaker. He was a member in good standing of the Freedom Caucus, a conservative body that serves as the vanguard for Trump’s agenda in the House of Representatives. They’ve led the charge in seeking a harder line on immigration legislation, and they’ve supported the president’s efforts to impose transparency on the Justice Department’s investigations into the presidency. But Sanford was not a Trump loyalist. He was severely critical of the president’s personal conduct and his heedlessly populist economic prescriptions. Donald Trump’s penchant for avenging petty slights prevented him from taking the high road and, on a whim and despite his advisors’ counsel, he announced on Twitter that he wanted to see Sanford defeated in a primary.

Sanford’s challenger promised to not only vote with Trump, as the congressman generally had, but also to preserve the president’s fragile ego. Beyond that, she also attacked Sanford for being too fiscally conservative when he served as the Palmetto State’s governor. Bottom line: Sanford’s conservative bona fides had suddenly become a liability in Trump’s GOP. And he paid for those new sins with his seat.

Trump’s hand-picked successor, Katie Arrington, seemed like a lock. She was a known quantity in a district that favors Republicans by 10 points, and she drew a relatively unknown challenger, the politically inexperienced 36-year-old Joe Cunningham. Arrington campaigned extensively on Trumpian themes—in particular, the migrant caravan traveling north through Mexico to the U.S. border. By contrast, Cunningham ran a centrist campaign pledging to unify his divided district and work with Republicans in Washington when possible.

Arrington’s brand was fixed to Trump’s, and that prevented her from pivoting away from him when it was necessary. To position herself as the unerringly pro-Trump candidate in her debates against Sanford, Arrington initially spoke positively of Trump’s plan to open the South Carolina coast to offshore oil drilling. But Cunningham made her pay for those displays of obeisance in the general election, and Arrington never recovered.

In the end, Cunningham won the city of Charleston by a staggering 57 to 42 percent, costing Arrington the race by a single point in a district Sanford won by 22 points two years earlier. Cunningham will become the first Democrat to represent South Carolina’s 1st in Congress since 1981.

In a postmortem, Arrington adopted a graceless touch. “We lost because Mark Sanford could not understand that this race was about the conservative movement,” she said, “and not about him.” She went on to harangue Sandford’s donors, for some reason, challenging them to demand the return of their donations to his campaign and pledging to run again in 2020.  But this petulant display suggests that there were no lessons learned from this debacle, and that may be the real lesson here. After all, being Trumpy means never having to say you were wrong.