Yes, it was a most disappointing mid-term election for the GOP. As the wave that ebbed into barely a ripple, Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness finds long-term good:

• Florida’s winner Ron DeSantis was empowered.
• The now cocky but still demented Joe Biden is delusional, convinced he could be a winner in 2024.
• Donald Trump now must either settle down or settle up.

Do not forget Donald Trump’s four historical accomplishments, Mr. Hanson reminds doleful Republicans. VDH believes Trump’s successes will only grow in light of Biden’s subsequent disastrous four years:

1. Donald Trump utterly destroyed the 30-year Clinton grifting and quid pro quo machine in general, and Hillary Clinton’s endless and often toxic political career in particular. It was characterized by the despicable Uranium One sale, the foreign shake-down contributions to the Clinton Foundation, her destruction of subpoenaed emails and devices, and her blatant violation of State Department rules of personal communications.
2. Clinton’s failing campaign and eventual collapse in 2016 was so shocking that it all but crushed her very psyche—to the point that she had funded a foreign ex-spy to systematically and illegally destroy her political opponent. She ended up denying the very legitimacy of the election she lost. Then she topped that off by urging Joe Biden not to accept the 2020 verdict should he lose the popular vote. Hillary Clinton is physically, psychologically, and spiritually spent—and never recovered from her ill-fated collisions with Donald Trump.
3. Trump’s actual four years of governance were characterized, before the advent of the pandemic, by robust growth, low inflation, energy independence, low unemployment, a rebuilding of the U.S. military, eventual curbing of illegal immigration, the Abraham Accords, and forcing NATO to spend far more on defense. Trump saved the Supreme Court and lower federal courts for a generation.
4. In his furious counterassault against a vicious administrative state, bankrupt media, and crazed elite bicoastal class, Trump survived and ended up exposing and discrediting them all.

Trump was the subject of the most biased coverage in modern presidential history, reports Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, which monitors media coverage,

The Spectator also reminds readers that the first thing to notice is that incumbents won last Tuesday no matter what their ideological tilt — not a single sitting senator or governor lost. The election was not a loss for the GOP. It was a postponement.

And no rival faction of American politics scored a lasting victory on November 8.