Democrats’ outlook for the midterms improved considerably after a confluence of improbable events unfolded in beautiful sequence on Friday.

The day kicked off with a jobs report that suggested the U.S. economy is showing signs it will endure whatever the pandemic manages to throw at it.

An upward revision of roughly 700,000 more jobs created in November and December than originally reported led to a historic revision for President Joe Biden: The first time ever the U.S. has created 7 million jobs in a single year. In January, Biden had celebrated 6.4 million as “the most jobs in any calendar year by any president in history.”

January’s job growth also came in far stronger than expected, with the economy reportedly adding 467,000 new jobs.

But the strong numbers posted amid both the lingering delta and ascendant omicron surges suggested something even more important—the U.S. economy may have passed the point where its fortunes are dictated by the whimsy of the pandemic.

So even as the country surpassed the tragic milestone of logging 900,000 pandemic deaths, the economy that voters remain hyper-focused on is proving to be extraordinarily resilient under the stewardship of Biden and congressional Democrats.  

The good-news jobs report even had some political reporters imagining what Democrats’ midterm message might look like. Politico’s Sam Stein tweeted the outlines of the Democratic case for maintaining control of Congress: historic job growth, pandemic under control, ISIS leader taken out, and the infrastructure bill taking effect.

But here’s what Stein left out: *The GOP is crazy.

Which brings me to what could prove to be a game changer in the midterms: The Republican National Committee voted Friday to endorse the violent Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as “legitimate political discourse.” The language was included in a resolution censuring Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois for their work on the select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The RNC’s defense of the Jan. 6 attackers is a stunning misread of how the American public feels about the assault on the Capitol and those who perpetrated it. As I wrote earlier this week, while Americans sometimes disagree about who exactly is responsible for the attack and what to call it, there isn’t much love among the vast majority of Americans for the perpetrators.

A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 72% of Americans say the people who took part in the Capitol attack were “threatening democracy.” A Daily Kos/Civiqs poll last July found that 75% of voters believe the perpetrators of the assault should be arrested, including 51% who favor arresting everyone who broke into the Capitol and 24% who favor arresting anyone who injured others or caused property damage.

So taking up the cause of the Jan. 6 attackers is a huge political liability for the Republican Party in a midterm that will be decided in a narrow slice of swing districts and states across the country. As much as the group may be “very special” to Donald Trump, they are not a sympathetic cause to the rest of the country.

But beyond the attackers themselves, endorsing the worst homegrown terrorist attack on the Capitol in the nation’s history completely flies in the face of the GOP’s supposed “law and order” messaging. In fact, Senate Republicans spent the week running scared after Trump pledged to pardon the Jan. 6 attackers if he were reelected president again in 2024.

When Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina released a surprising statement opposing Trump’s pardon proposal, the first line read, “As a conservative, I firmly believe in law and order and support the police.”

So after spending the week dodging questions about whether they support pardoning the Jan. 6 attackers, GOP lawmakers will now face a new and hopefully enduring round of questions: Do they endorse defiling the Capitol, assaulting police officers, and threatening to hang the vice president of the United States as “legitimate political discourse”?

Some House Republicans might be itching to jump on that Trump train to fringelandia. But facing those questions will confound any Republican running in swing territory because it effectively forces them to choose between courting Trump’s cultists and sounding reasonable enough to woo suburban voters back into the GOP field.

Rep. Cheney summed up the GOP dilemma nicely in a tweet.

No sane-ish suburban voter views the deadly violence that unfolded that day as “legitimate,” and they sure as heck don’t want to vote for a party that foments it in America’s streets.

Even the chair of the RNC, Ronna McDaniel—who guided the resolution to a quick vote—spent the rest of Friday trying to paper over the GOP’s seditionist support. McDaniel castigated the New York Times for a headline reading, “GOP Declares Jan. 6 Attack ‘Legitimate Political Discourse.'”

“Completely false,” she charged, without elaborating on what exactly was incorrect.

McDaniel also issued a statement in which she had reworked the actual language in the resolution in an effort to rewrite history shortly after the RNC had passed a resolution assailing Cheney and Kinzinger for “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

McDaniel’s follow-up statement conveniently suggested that the RNC had not endorsed the Jan. 6 attackers, but rather peaceful protesters—a distinction that was never made in the actual resolution.

Cheney and Kinzinger, McDaniel said, “chose to join Nancy Pelosi in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.” The italicized portion had not appeared in the resolution.

A week in which the economy appears to be firing on all cylinders despite the pandemic as the RNC declares itself the party of domestic terrorism is a good week for Democrats. Now the trick will be to spend the rest of the midterm cycle inextricably tying the Republican Party to their endorsement of the worst homegrown attack on the U.S. seat of government in history.