Donald Trump knows polls. He knows how to locate polls the moment they are posted, how to condense polls to tweetable brevity, and how to unveil polls to a crowd for maximum effect. So there has been a special insult in those moments, in the final weeks of this election, when even the polls seem intent on humiliating him. More than twenty-four national surveys released in October revealed “a split between polls that are good for Hillary Clinton and polls that are fantastic for her,” in the words of Andrew Prokop, of Vox. Barely three weeks to Election Day, short of a radical change that would salvage his fortunes, Trump is careening toward his greatest embarrassment in a life of spectacular pratfalls. (Clintonworld, meanwhile, has been consumed by an embarrassment of options—namely, whether she should spend her money to run up the score or to help other candidates down-ballot.)

Losing versus losing huge is more than a difference of degree: each experience has a very different effect on the loser. What would a massive Trump loss leave behind? To some Republicans, the prospect of a truly crushing defeat is strangely attractive: it could be a disinfectant, a bug bomb, an unambiguous verdict against the side of the Party that has catered to an aging, shrinking demographic, a chance to close, or at least bridge, the rift between Tea Party conservatives and the Party establishment—something akin to the rout of the conservative Senator Barry Goldwater, of Arizona, in 1964. Nominated over the objections of moderates, Goldwater, who voted against the Civil Rights Act, lost forty-four states to Lyndon Johnson, who took sixty-one per cent of the popular vote, the highest in Presidential-election history. Four years later, after confronting the evidence that Goldwater’s vision was too far to the right of the country, the Party surmounted its divisions and selected Richard Nixon, an establishment creature who went on to win in 1968 and 1972 (and, two years after that, to resign in disgrace). As my colleague Jeffrey Frank noted this week, Goldwater left behind a Republican establishment that was more or less intact. It had discernible leaders; the Party after Trump may not be so fortunate.