Well, now we have evidence of just how horrible the fallout from Friday’s Trump tapes is: NBC/WSJ poll taken over the weekend has Hillary with a double-digit lead over Trump. And:

As Republicans grapple with how to hold on to control of the House and Senate despite the Trump campaign’s woes, Democrats overall now have a seven-point advantage on the question of which party voters want to see in control of Congress.

Forty-nine percent of voters say they’d like to see Democrats in power on Capitol Hill, compared to 42 percent who chose the GOP.

That’s up from a three-point advantage for Democrats (48 percent to 45 percent) last month, and it’s the largest advantage for Democrats since the October 2009 government shutdown.

House Speaker Paul Ryan now says he won’t campaign for or appear with the GOP presidential nominee any longer, and has told House Republicans to do whatever they have to do regarding Trump to save their seats. Protecting their Congressional majority is the most important thing for Republicans now.

But look at this, from the NYT:

But in a potentially ominous sign for the party, Kellyanne Conway, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, also offered a note of warning for Republicans fleeing Mr. Trump. Mr. Ryan, she noted on television, had been booed by Trump fans over the weekend in Wisconsin after asking Mr. Trump not to attend a political event in his home state.

Ms. Conway also repeatedly indicated that she was aware of Republican lawmakers who had behaved inappropriately toward young women, and whose criticism of Mr. Trump was therefore hypocritical.

Trump is going to drop those names. You watch.

I still believe that Trump showed better than Hillary did in last night’s debate, but I concede that it wasn’t remotely enough of a performance to make up for what he lost with the disclosure of that tape.

The best the GOP can hope for out of this catastrophe is that it will prove in the long run to have been a Goldwater year: a definitive rejection of the party’s nominee, but the beginning of the nominee’s ideas starting to change the GOP mainstream. As it is, I don’t think Trump has any real ideas, only intuitions, but on the anti-globalist, nationalist front, he’s right about them. I expect that we will see more and more Republican candidates at the grassroots running on them. On the other hand, it’s hard to figure from where they will get the money, given where corporate funding is likely to go.

And, people who campaigned for Goldwater were not disgraced by his loss or their affiliation with him. That’s not going to happen this time. Nor will the Trumpsters be eager to make nice with the GOP establishment. Drumpfstoßlegende!