Robert Costa and Philip Rucker report for the Washington Post that Republican senators are alarmed about the president’s sinking popularity but fear breaking with him: “Haunting the senators and their advisers is the experience of former senators such as Kelly Ayotte, a Republican from New Hampshire who spoke out against Trump’s ‘Access Hollywood’ comments bragging about sexually assault and went on to lose her 2016 reelection race, according to advisers close to several senators.”

Ayotte got more votes in New Hampshire than Trump did. And many other Republicans denounced the “Access Hollywood” comments and won. Rob Portman, for example, beat a former governor by 21 points in Ohio. The lesson of the 2016 results for Senate Republicans isn’t that they’ll suffer for criticizing Trump.

It may instead be that it doesn’t matter what they do: Their political fates are not in their hands. Looking at all the results that year, we can see two trends: Most Republican Senate candidates ran ahead of Trump; all Republican Senate candidates won in states Trump won and lost in states Trump lost.

Maybe that correlation won’t be perfect this year. But by and large, Republican chances in Senate races are going to be tied to how well Trump does — and Republican Senate candidates can’t do much to affect that.