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Tuesday evening, while waiting for national election results to come in, I dropped by the victory party for Mark Robinson, the North Carolina Republican nominee for governor. It was, as you might expect, a strange scene.

Robinson, the lieutenant governor, had become persona non grata among most other Republicans in September, when a CNN report revealed his bizarre posts—about slavery, being a “Black Nazi,” transgender porn, and more—on the porn site Nude Africa. He was no longer invited to attend rallies for the Donald Trump campaign, his fundraising dried up, and his campaign was left for dead.

The party, held on the top floor of a skyscraper in Raleigh, was pointedly separate from other North Carolina GOP festivities. Some 60 or 70 supporters crammed into a small room in a private club watching Fox News. It was a more diverse crowd than any other Republican gathering I’ve ever attended, and nearly everyone was decked out in Robinson gear. I noticed only one piece of Trump swag, and a wide range of other fashion choices. A younger Black man wore a satin jacket with red-sequin embroidery; an older white guy wore a white tuxedo jacket, complete with bow tie, over a red Mark Robinson T-shirt.

Polls in North Carolina closed at 7:30 p.m. ET. Just a few minutes later, Fox News projected that the Democrat Josh Stein, the current state attorney general, would beat Robinson. I expected to hear jeers or a murmur or feel some deflation in the room, but nothing happened. I started wondering if I’d misread, but no: Fox repeated the call several times in the next few minutes, and eventually someone changed the channel to Spectrum News. I asked some attendees what they made of the news, and was told over and over that they had hope that the call was premature.

[David A. Graham: The great, disappearing Trump campaign]

This was not exactly a denial, and around 9, Robinson took the stage and conceded the race. “The window of opportunity for us to win this race is closing quick, folks,” he said. “Doesn’t seem like it’s going our way tonight. But it’s always going our way. Whether people want it to or not, people of faith know it’s going to go the right way, because we’ve read the back of the book. We know how this all comes to an end.” He barely alluded to the scandals that had sunk his campaign, saying, “It’s not about the lies; it’s not about the half-truths.” Soon, attendees began streaming out, clutching handfuls of campaign signs and hats.

It was a fittingly weird start to a weird night in North Carolina politics. The Old North State delivered a series of results that show why national Democrats have been so hopeful about flipping it, while likely discouraging them from trying again for some time.

Trump won the state in the presidential election. Kamala Harris received both a smaller percentage of the vote than President Joe Biden did four years ago and (in unofficial results) a smaller absolute number of votes. That all happened despite a massive campaign infrastructure and get-out-the-vote operation, especially as compared with the Trump campaign. In the deep-red counties where Harris had hoped to cut into Republican margins, she barely managed to move the ball or else lost ground. National Democrats poured money into the state, and once again, it broke their hearts.

Down the ballot, however, North Carolina Democrats had a good night. Stein beat Robinson by almost 15 points. That matches with some of the public polling on the race, but most insiders seemed to expect a margin closer to the high single-digits. The Democrat Rachel Hunt flipped the lieutenant governor’s seat. Jeff Jackson held off Dan Bishop for attorney general; no Republican has won the seat since the 19th century. Secretary of State Elaine Marshall won another term. For superintendent of public instruction, Mo Green beat Michele Morrow, who attended the January 6, 2021, rally and called for Barack Obama’s execution. In a heartbreaker for Democrats, state-supreme-court justice Allison Riggs appears to have lost her seat narrowly, but in the state legislature, Democrats broke a veto-proof Republican supermajority. U.S. Representative Don Davis eked out a win in northeastern North Carolina.

[David A. Graham: Mark Robinson is testing the bounds of GOP extremism]

One lesson from this is that North Carolina really is a purple state, as the political scientist Chris Cooper describes in a new book. Voters are happy to elect Democrats at the state level; they just don’t want them in the White House or the U.S. Senate. (The last election North Carolinians selected a Democrat for either was in 2008.)

Across the country, the election looks similar—more a repudiation of national Democrats, and especially the Democratic candidate for president, than a rejection of Democratic policy priorities. (I argued yesterday that Trump’s simple message on the economy is what carried him to victory.) Harris made abortion a centerpiece of her campaign and lost, but voters in seven states passed ballot referenda protecting abortion rights—some in blue states, but also in purple and red states including Arizona, Nevada, and Montana. Missouri voters overturned an abortion ban. And 57 percent of Floridians supported a ballot issue, a number that nonetheless fell short of the 60 percent required for passage. A majority, but not the requisite supermajority, of Floridians also voted to legalize recreational cannabis use. Even in U.S. Senate races, Democratic candidates ran ahead of Harris in almost every competitive contest. (Florida was the odd race out.)

That mixed result is also a mixed message for Democrats trying to figure out where the party goes from here. Having a reasonably popular policy platform is theoretically good news for them, but that isn’t much use if they can’t win the offices required to institute or defend those policies. But with little real power in Washington for the next two years, they’ll have plenty of time to think about the conundrum.

In the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump did the following things: falsely accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating their neighbors’ pets; invited a comedian onstage at a rally to call Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”; said he wouldn’t mind if someone shot the reporters who cover his rallies; fantasized about former Representative Liz Cheney having guns “trained on her face”; called America a “garbage can for the world”; and pretended to fellate a microphone in public. Then, on Tuesday night, he decisively won the presidential election, sweeping every battleground state in the country.

That Trump routinely gets away with saying things that would have ended any other politician’s career is hardly a novel observation. People have been making this point since he launched his first campaign nine years ago. Theories abound to explain the phenomenon, and we’ll get to those in a moment. But, first, do me a favor and reread that paragraph above. Clock your reflexive reaction. Do you find yourself indifferently skimming, or notice that your attention has begun to drift? Do you roll your eyes at what looks like yet another scoldy catalog of Trump’s alleged misdeeds, or mentally quibble with my characterizations? (He was obviously joking about Cheney.) Perhaps you’re thinking that you missed one of these moments—or maybe you’re not quite sure. Hasn’t he said something about shooting reporters before? Who can remember—all of this stuff blends together.

What you’re experiencing is the product of Trump’s clearest political accomplishment, and perhaps his most enduring legacy: In his near decade as America’s main character, he has thoroughly desensitized voters to behavior that, in another era, they would have deemed disqualifying in a president. The national bar for outrage keeps rising; the ability to be shocked has dwindled.

Trump is not the first modern president to contribute to this national numbing effect. Richard Nixon’s abuses of power shattered the idyllic image many Americans had of the presidency, seeding a skepticism that would eventually blossom into generational cynicism. And Bill Clinton’s affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky—complete with the airing of every graphic detail by opponents, and the rush to excuse his indiscretions by allies—helped normalize the idea that presidents don’t need to be moral exemplars.

But when it comes to lowering our collective expectations of presidential behavior, Trump is a singular figure. The lines he has enterprisingly crossed—legal, ethical, constitutional, moral—are too numerous to list. (Plus, chances are, you’d get bored and abandon this article if I tried.) But it seems worth noting here just a few of Trump’s firsts. He is the first president to try to stay in power after losing an election. He is the first president to be impeached twice (for attempting to trade military aid for political favors from the Ukrainian president, and for sending a violent mob to storm the Capitol). He is the first to be convicted of a felony (for crimes connected with hush-money payments to an adult-film star with whom he had an affair), and the first to be found liable for sexual abuse (for assaulting E. Jean Carroll in a department-store dressing room). He demonstrates no contrition for these acts. In fact, he’s always denied all wrongdoing—even as he’s boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing the support of his base.

Trump’s apologists might argue that his success is a symptom, not the cause, of the country’s coarsened character. Alternatively, something about his public persona, forged in the New York tabloids and on reality TV, may make people uniquely tolerant of his sins. After all, the same voters in North Carolina who delivered him the state’s 16 Electoral College votes this week also rejected a Trump-aligned candidate for governor who’d been discovered making vile anti-Semitic and racist comments on a porn site. Trump has also no doubt been aided by Republican politicians who cravenly defend everything he does, blundering Democrats who have struggled to provide a compelling alternative, and a press corps still constrained by its “bias toward coherence.”

In any case, the fact remains that Trump’s brazenness damages the political culture. Every time he crosses a new line, he makes it that much easier for the next guy to do so. Nearly a decade into the Trump era, too many Americans have internalized the idea that expecting our political leaders to be good people is quaint and foolish. But this savvier-than-thou attitude only empowers Trump and his mimics to act with impunity.

Is it possible to resensitize an electorate to scandal and cruelty? I don’t know. Maybe we start by trying to remember how we felt when all of this was still new.

In recent weeks, Gen Z voters have been sharing videos of themselves on TikTok listening—for what they say is the first time—to Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape. I found watching these videos, and reading some of the young people’s interviews in The Washington Post, at once heartbreaking and hopeful. Brigid Quinn, a 15-year-old in Georgia who had never actually heard the once and future president say “grab them by the pussy,” told the paper she “didn’t understand how people thought this was normal.” Kate Sullivan, a 21-year-old student in Ohio, was similarly shocked when she heard it for the first time. “I just recently got into politics,” she said. “The fact that people knew about this, and he still won, is pretty wild to me.”

A less cynical age may dawn again.