Yet if Trump’s mission of restoration has deepened his support, it has also imposed a restrictive boundary around it. The growing groups long eclipsed in American life have no idealized past moment they are longing to restore. A young Hispanic lawyer or middle-aged professional woman might not think they are treated equally today, but few are likely to believe people like them enjoyed more opportunities decades ago. The same is true for other racial and religious minorities, gays, and transgender people. For all of these groups, the past that Trump evokes is one that kept them subordinate, in the shadows, or worse.

“It’s almost a cultural nostalgia, for when white male culture [was] most dominant,” the Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher said. “When African American and Hispanic voters hear that … they get the joke that going back to the past [would be] great for some but at the expense of others.”

In that way, Trump’s persistent promises to “bring back” an earlier America seem certain to deepen a shift from class to culture as America’s central political divide. As I’ve written, Democrats now represent a coalition of transformation (revolving around minorities, Millennials, and college-educated whites, especially women) largely comfortable with demographic and cultural change. In turn, Republicans champion a competing coalition of restoration largely uneasy with these changes (built mostly on blue-collar, older, religious and non-urban whites).