It is very hopeful to think that dilution of Republican attention in 2017 will prevent outcomes like this, but it remains to be seen whether the media predicting a Democratic wave will paradoxically energize Republican voters on a national level and allow them to hold on.
The question right now is if funneling Republicans into a separate information ecosystem, wherein the negative barbs of the mainstream media and Washington establishment, will allow them to assume something like a permanently energized state. They were already reliable voters, but it seems like we may be entering a state where the Republican floor is even higher, relative to their share of the population, than it has ever been, because anytime something goes wrong, they only have to hear about it through a filter that softens or utterly inverts it. In some ways, being so reprehensible that people can only justify reflexively supporting you by not engaging with mainstream sources of information at all, is a pretty brilliant political strategy.
