THE DEMOCRATS LOST BECAUSE OF THEIR BRAND.

moment Democrats decided to turn the race into a referendum on Trump. “Republicans saw Ossoff’s campaign omnipresence as a political siege and call for resistance,” notes Billy Michael Honor, a Presbyterian minister and resident of the district and self-described progressive, in an astute column at The Huffington Post. “The end result being the Republican base outperforming an energized Democratic Party voter turnout campaign.”

Whatever their misgivings about Trump, those Republicans weren’t about to give Nancy Pelosi the satisfaction of a national victory. Contemporary liberalism now expresses itself chiefly in the language of self-affirmation and moral censure: of being the party of the higher-minded; of affixing the suffix “phobe” to millions of people who don’t appreciate being described as bigots.

It’s intolerable. It’s why so many well-educated Republicans who find nothing to admire in the president’s dyspeptic boorishness find even less to like in his opponents’ snickering censoriousness. It’s why a political strategy by Democrats that seeks to turn every local race into a referendum on Trump is likely to fail.

One temptation Democrats would be smart to avoid is to see Ossoff ’s loss as evidence that the party needs to move further left, on the theory that not enough of the base showed up to vote. In fact, turnout for Ossoff was extraordinary for a special election. And nominating more progressive candidates isn’t likely to solve the contempt problem, at least with voters not yet in sync with progressive orthodoxies on coal, guns or gender-neutral bathrooms.

Democrats may also want to reconsider the wisdom of pursuing, and hyping, the investigation into Russia’s election meddling as a means of re-litigating last year’s election. Maybe Robert Mueller will uncover evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, or otherwise catch the president in a lie under oath.

But the longer the investigation proceeds without finding convincing evidence of malfeasance, the likelier it is Americans will draw the conclusion that Trump is right to call the investigation a witch hunt and begin to sympathize with him. Nobody likes a Javert. It happened for Bill Clinton in 1998 in his duel with Ken Starr.

Speaking of the 42nd president, many are the charges that can be laid at his feet, but contempt for half of all Americans was never one of them. Whatever happened to the party of the president who was centrist, cheerful, liked Americans just as they are — and left the party in far better shape than Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama?

The Georgia election will quickly sink down the memory hole. But the lessons to Democrats for how not to run against Trump and an America that, like it or not, he represents, are there for all to see.