Survivors were easier to identify than winners.

The losers, though, were easy to spot.

The biggest of them was, of course, former President Donald Trump.

Trump continued his unblemished record of voter rejections. In no election since he rode the escalator down at Trump Tower to declare his candidacy for the White House has the one-time reality TV star managed to persuade a majority of the people to vote for him and his cause—whatever that might be.

In 2016, the year he claimed the presidency, he lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton by roughly 3 million ballots. Only some quirks of the Electoral College put him in the Oval Office.

Two years later, in the off-year election of 2018, Trump led the Republican Party to a crushing defeat at the polls. The GOP surrendered control of the U.S. House of Representatives as Republican candidates tallied 10 million fewer votes than their Democratic opponents.

Then, in 2020, Trump squared off against Democrat Joe Biden. This time, Trump came up 7 million votes short—and then engaged in a prolonged and delusional temper tantrum about the injustice of seeing the American people express a preference for another leader.

The roots of the 2022 Republican debacle can be found in the former president’s ongoing self-pity party. The candidates he backed—in fact, the ones he foisted upon the GOP—were forced to embrace his deranged and evidence-free rantings about how he had been robbed in 2020.

That’s right.

At a time when Americans of all races, genders, faiths and occupations were hungry—even desperate—to find a path forward through inflation and uncertainty, Trump and his acolytes kept demanding that people look not forward but backward in anger.

Even rage.

If there was an overarching lesson to be drawn from this year’s exercise in the most basic ritual of self-government, it was that most Americans have grown weary. They are tired of the ongoing insanity of the Trump movement, exhausted by a petulant would-be leader who unceasingly seeks not to solve their problems but instead to exploit them.

What made for satisfying low-brow entertainment on television proved to be an ongoing disaster in the real life of politics and public policy.

The voters rejected Trumpism in a historic fashion.

In normal midterm elections, the party in power—in this case, the Democrats—receives a stiff reminder from the public about who really is in charge. If this had been a typical off-year election, Democrats could have been expected to lose anywhere from 35 to 60 seats in the House and at least five in the Senate.

Instead, Republicans likely will pick up seven or eight House seats at most—and they may end up losing a seat in the Senate.

That’s quite an obvious rebuke of Trump and Trumpism.

What is far less clear is how Americans feel about Biden and the Democrats.

Two years ago, the president and many members of his party took their victory over Trump as a mandate to enact a sweeping agenda of progressive approaches to public policy. They were mistaken in that.

The mandate the American people gave the new president was a profound wish to have as their commander-in-chief someone who wasn’t a loon constantly raving on social media. They voted for peace and quiet—and little more than that.

Because Democrats consciously ran against Trump again this year, they once again will find themselves empowered to be nothing more than a tranquil presence in American life.

As a strategy for winning a difficult campaign, theirs was a winning one.

As a plan for governing a still troubled country, though, it leaves a lot to be desired.

In part, that’s because it echoes one of Trumpism’s lesser offenses—that of defining one’s allegiances and agenda by what one opposes rather than what one supports.

This just completed election makes clear what Americans do not want. They are done with craziness, finished with frothing at the mouth as a political philosophy.

What they are for, though, is far less clear.

When the voters spoke, they did so in tones that were both loud and muffled.