Bernard Schmidt and I were talking about the recent election and the Trump phenomenon, and I said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if, by some chance, he could have defeated Mitt Romney?”

I’ve got lots of time ahead of me. But I know that you haven’t got time for idle speculation. My point is not to say Romney is a hero, just as I have not gone around saying that Barack Obama could have defeated George W. Bush. (To clarify: I haven’t gone around saying that Clinton could have defeated Trump.)

But now that we’re three weeks away from the election, what then? I’m not sure. I wish I were. There’s been no indication that Republicans are in a panic. I heard nothing Monday morning on the Fox talk shows of Republicans in a panic.

That said, it’s pretty interesting that Trump continues to win even though his campaign and his supporters have made a major mess of what was supposed to be a campaign about the economy and winning over Latinos and women and the African American community.

We’ll get to the reasons for the decline in the electorate — and I’ll get to that in Part 2 — but here’s a brief overview. The reason it’s important to get to Part 2 is that if the numbers continue to fall, Democrats are going to have a much harder time running the table of House and Senate races and picking up seats in their presidential nominees’ home states.

More importantly, the next president is going to inherit the problem because Democrats will lose a great many seats in their congressional majority. But Democrats do have a chance to regain some political momentum in the midterms.

So let me explain my reasons.

I’ll start with the economic part. Republicans — including Republicans in red states — are very concerned about the fact that Trump and the economics policy positions he’s made are hurting the economy, especially the blue-collar workers who voted for him. The reason this matters to Republicans is that blue-collar voters tend to be more conservative. They also tend to value the “big government, big-government” worldview and so on, which is the opposite of what Trump stands for.

Democrats don’t seem to care.

Democrats also continue to believe that Trump’s candidacy is damaging to Hillary Clinton’s chances for another term. Part of that is likely their worry that Trump will be a liability in blue states. I don’t know why they think