The Republican Party is facing some tough choices after Tuesday's election results, but the most likely outcome is that they can't or won't make them.

And that spells trouble for its chances in 2024 — no matter what the latest polls are saying about President Joe Biden's weakness.

Abortion as an issue that breaks strongly for the Democrats doesn’t seem to be going away at any point soon, and neither, apparently, is Donald Trump.

Republicans don’t have much of a choice about the former. Anti-abortion activists have been a dominant organized group within the party for some 40 years and they’re hardly going to back off after their big victory in the Supreme Court.

Parties do care about winning elections, but a party’s policy agenda and priorities are mainly determined by what the people active in the party want — and Republican party actors care deeply about abortion. Just look at the newly elected House speaker’s record on the issue.

As far as Trump is concerned, Republicans have had some real opportunities to move beyond him, but they haven’t done so yet and they may be stuck with him next year at this point, in part because a lot of Republican party actors now are strong Trump supporters. His path to the nomination is so clear at the moment that he’s refused to participate in debates.

Losing candidates — and losing presidents — usually don’t stick around in the spotlight. Trump has been the opposite, and for whatever reasons the party has chosen to indulge him, despite the fact that he’s never been popular throughout his political career, losing the popular vote in both 2020 and 2024 and never hitting 50% approval throughout his presidency. And that’s before he was indicted four times, had one court find him to have committed sexual assault and another about to find that his business empire was fraudulent.

None of that means he has no chance to win a second presidential term; indeed, as the must-discussed New York Times polling this week and other polls have found, current horse race polling shows him doing quite well against Biden. But it may mean that when people vote, instead of just thinking about a president they don’t approve of they also think about his opponent, who they also dislike. They may even think mainly about the attention-seeking former president.

The other thing worth mentioning is that the whole constellation of "anti-woke” measures and themes Republicans have been running on over the last couple of years, including attacks on trans people, have been total flops as far as winning elections is concerned. Again, it’s hard to be certain of exactly what does and doesn’t drive votes, but Republican failures do make it clear that those issues are certainly not overwhelmingly successful for them. Given the popularity of this stuff in the conservative marketplace, however, it’s not clear that Republican opinion leaders will back off at all.

It’s possible that if Biden rallies and becomes more popular, it will mainly be among the people who currently say they don’t like him but vote for Democrats anyway. If that’s the case, then a significant Biden rally may only make his popularity align better with election results, rather than expanding the Democratic advantage. And if Biden doesn’t rally, it’s possible that he’ll drag down the ticket from the top — that the effect of Democrats outperforming Biden’s popularity won’t work when Biden is the one on the ballot. We just don’t know how that will play out.

But in the meantime, elections matter regardless of what they do or don’t signal about future elections. And after Tuesday night, abortion rights are going to be more secure for Ohioans and Virginians — and more accessible for nearby residents of states that have imposed bans. And while Kentucky Gov. Andy Bashear will still find his vetoes regularly overriden by a very Republican legislature (that wasn’t on the ballot this year), Virginia’s governor, Glenn Youngkin, will find his legislative agenda blocked by a unified Democratic legislature in that state.

Overall, then, the biggest takeaway from these elections is that policy is going to shift very modestly in the Democrats’ direction, especially compared with what might have happened had there been a normal reaction to an unpopular president. And regardless of what happens next November, that’s a big deal for now.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.