Leave the rest of the numbers aside for a moment and consider these figures. The party of the sitting president has lost seats in the US House of Representatives in all but two midterms since 1946. The average loss is 27 seats. According to one analysis, presidents with approval ratings above 50% have seen their parties lose an average of 14 seats since 1946. Presidents with approval ratings below 50% have seen their parties lose an average of 37 seats.

Polls suggest Joe Biden’s current approval rating stands at about 41%. Republicans needed to take five seats to win the chamber. It remains likely that they’ll get them in the hours and days ahead. But the fact that they haven’t already ⁠– and that Democrats have a non-trivial chance of actually keeping the chamber ⁠– is highly significant. The Democrats may have had the best midterm a president’s party has experienced in 20 years ⁠– since 9/11 brought Republicans to slight, trend-bucking gains in the House and Senate in 2002.

Of course, much of the relief and exuberance Democratic leaders and candidates are feeling this morning will dissipate if and when the Republican majority, whatever its final size, is secured. While it’s preferable to lose the House by a little rather than a lot, losing it by any margin guarantees that toxicity and inanity will grip Washington again for a minimum of two years ⁠– irrespective of the outcome in the Senate.

Biden cannot expect cooperation from Republicans on major issues in divided government – it’s unclear, in fact, whether Congress will even manage to raise the debt ceiling again if Democrats don’t figure out a way to settle the issue, and avert a crisis that’s been gestating for over a decade now, before January.

It is clear, though, that House Republicans would use their majority to harass the administration and Democrats with investigations, hearings, cant and conspiracy theories in the run-up to 2024. The main character of Biden’s Congress thus far has been Joe Manchin; there’s a decent chance that he’ll be turning the spotlight over to Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Political science and political history suggest there was little Democrats might have done to fully avoid that possibility. The party’s House majority was incredibly narrow and presidents have consistently lost seats under a wide variety of conditions. The rate of inflation, the subject of most of the last year’s punditry and predictions, is poorly correlated with midterm outcomes, as is employment growth.

Income growth is a more reliable indicator, but as best as those who’ve studied midterms can tell, the factors that reliably hobble the party holding the White House may be more elemental. Voters that just won the presidency are more likely to blow off the midterms, voters that just lost it are more likely to angrily show up, and some voters ⁠– in keeping with messaging and norms impressed upon them by the press, political elites and grade school civics teachers ⁠– vote against the party in power just to bring more partisan balance to Washington.

Despite all that, Democrats managed to significantly outperform expectations. Republicans and centrist commentators widely predicted voters would sharply recoil at the scale of Biden’s policy agenda and the inflation it contributed to. They didn’t. Over the last few weeks, many of the same voices insisted that the Democratic closing argument on democracy wouldn’t matter or resonate. Perhaps it did. And over the last few months, we were told repeatedly that anxieties about rising crime would boost Republicans across the country ⁠– even in New York, where it was supposed that Republican Lee Zeldin had a real shot at winning the governor’s race.

That didn’t happen – suggesting that the electorate was more troubled by other anxieties that hurt the right, including worries about reproductive freedom. In the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, voters in deeply conservative Kansas surprised many by rejecting an abortion ban. Last night, voters in Kentucky ⁠– a state Donald Trump won by double digits ⁠– rejected another anti-abortion measure while California, Michigan and Vermont voted to codify abortion rights in their state constitutions.

As loudly as many pundits argued that Democrats would be crushed on Tuesday absent deeper moderation on abortion and other issues, it should be plain now that the burden of moderation, as far as much of the electorate is concerned, falls primarily upon the Republican party: the Democrats’ shocking overperformance amounts to a shocking underperformance on its part.

Republicans’ substantive radicalism on abortion policy and elsewhere aside, it should also be plain that they’ve been burdened by their outre personalities, including the man at Mar-a-Lago and candidates who spent much of the last several months regurgitating his nonsense about the 2020 campaign to weary general election voters. Some of them are still at it. The Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, for instance, narrowly behind in her race at time of writing, alluded to conspiracy theories about voter fraud in her election night speech.

Meanwhile, according to a number of reports, some Republican insiders and elites are privately wising up to realities already obvious to those who’ve studied the current political landscape closely. Donald Trump is a political amateur who narrowly won an electoral college victory in an unusual election six years ago. He’s a deeply polarizing and unpopular figure; most of the electorate reviles his political style and his policy ideas, to the extent that he has them.

The structural advantages that the federal system affords the most conservative parts of the country have prevented the Republican party from fully bearing the costs of Trump’s rise and presidency – and they may well bring him to victory again in the next election. But Trump has been costly, and we can expect a cadre of Republican power-brokers and money men to pursue alternative candidates with more urgency now.

That ought to trigger a shift in messaging from Democrats. Throughout this election and the last, Biden and other party figures and candidates labored to give voters the impression Trumpism is a passing fad on the right; the dream of a redeemable Republican party is still alive in the rhetoric of Democratic leaders, if not genuinely in their hearts. But it’s substantively untrue and strategically unwise to maintain that the right’s threats to equality and the democratic process are contained fully in Trump’s person and the figures who’ve tethered themselves closely to him.

Over the last quarter century in particular, our politics have been coarsened and destabilized not by a narrow faction of Super-Ultra-Extra-Mega-Magnum-Maga Republicans, but by the Republican party and the wider conservative movement as a whole. It’s long past time for Democrats to make that case to the public plainly and unapologetically.

If they don’t ⁠– and the Republicans do, in fact, take part or all of Congress ⁠– gridlock in Washington, invented scandals and boredom with Biden may encourage a pivotal share of voters to give Republican governance another chance in 2024.

• Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist