When a political party takes a shellacking at the polls, it’s normal for its members to do the kind of soul-searching Vermont Republicans are now engaged in after losing 12 seats in the state House of Representatives and one in the Senate this fall. Some of them might even agree with Eric Davis, an academic who has devoted close attention to the state’s politics over many years. “This is the worst shape the GOP has been in in the modern era of Vermont politics,” he told VtDigger.

Indeed, Republicans could take comfort only in the performance of Gov. Phil Scott, who burnished his moderate credentials while cruising to a 15 point re-election victory over Democrat Christine Hallquist. No other Republican was elected to statewide or federal office; the party now has only 43 seats in the House, well short of the 50 it would need to sustain a gubernatorial veto; and the loss of a seat in the Senate cemented Democrats control of that body.

Not to worry, says Brady Toensing, vice chairman of the state Republican Party. He attributed the losses to a “cyclical phenomenon,” and said that Republicans just need to recruit candidates better able to articulate “the party’s message of affordability.” Other than that, Toensing said, “we need to double down on how hard we fight.”

There is certainly something to the notion that election results are cyclical in nature. But Toensing’s prescription ignores the rogue elephant in the room, Donald J. Trump — something voters in Vermont and many other states were not about to do in the midterm elections. It is entirely possible that in Vermont, where the president is extremely unpopular, substantial numbers of voters simply decided not to vote for any candidate identified as a Republican. That would help explain why a batch of veteran GOP moderates lost House races, including Kurt Wright of Burlington.

Ironically, the Republicans had a template for success in Scott, who managed to fashion a bipartisan re-election victory by repudiating Trump’s style and substance while combining fiscal conservatism with moderate stands on social issues.

The state party apparatus, on the other hand, appears to be aligned with Trump, judging by its messaging during the campaign. This included a call to donors to help “Make Vermont Great Again” by tossing out “every last liberal elitist politician in Montpelier.” Not surprisingly, this kind of rhetoric fell on deaf ears in Vermont.

This situation regarding Trump presents the state’s Republicans with a quandary going forward, bearing in mind that, in politics as in investment, past performance is no guarantee of future results. In two years, the United States could be facing a national security crisis that unifies the nation; the economy could at last be producing solid gains for low- and middle-income workers; the tide might be turning in the trade war with China. Unlikely as it now seems, these, or any number of other unforeseen circumstances, might cause Trump’s popularity to rebound, putting anti-Trump Republicans in jeopardy in 2020.

Rather than trying to predict the future, members of the Vermont GOP might do better to think about what it actually means to be a Republican — and what it doesn’t mean — now that the party has moved so sharply to the right nationally.

It certainly no longer means being fiscally conservative. No true conservative would have supported adding billions of dollars to the federal deficit in boom times by granting a massive tax cut to corporations and wealthy individuals, as Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress did last December. The days when Republicans were in the forefront of the environmental protection movement are long gone, replaced by a doctrine of climate-change denial. Gun safety measures are off the table for Republicans in Washington. And few senior party members have protested Trump’s vicious persecution of immigrants or his attempts to make a mockery of the rule of law.

What it could mean to be a Republican in Vermont is following Scott’s lead in recommitting the party to civil discourse and bipartisan problem-solving while in the minority, rather than hewing to an “affordability” agenda that focuses almost entirely on not raising taxes.

Affordability has many dimensions. Health care, the cost of higher education, the minimum wage and family leave are all areas where Republicans could try to forge fiscally responsible ways to address the real problems Vermonters face every day, and thereby avoid being consigned to permanent minority status.