All of this signals that, even without his personal foibles, Trumpism alienates precisely the electorate’s fastest growing groups, which include minorities, millennials, and college-educated white women. That’s why so many Republican strategists have long feared he was steering the GOP to disaster by identifying it so explicitly with white backlash against demographic, cultural, and economic change.

The challenge those Trump critics face is that his bristling defensive nationalism has struck a powerful chord within the Republican coalition—primarily, but not exclusively, within its growing blue-collar wing. Chen, like many GOP thinkers, believes Republicans can’t simply revert to their old agenda of free trade and smaller government if Trump loses, but must find ways to address the white working-class anxieties that “Trump exposed” in ways that don’t alienate so many other voters.

That would be a difficult needle to thread under any circumstances: Long before Trump, the party was already relying on a “coalition of restoration” centered on the voters most uneasy about America’s growing racial and cultural diversity. But crafting a more inclusive agenda will only get tougher with Trump supporters like radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham preemptively attributing a possible defeat not to a rejection of his ideas, but to a stab in the back from the party’s “pro-globalization wing.” The nominee himself echoed that idea in a flurry of Tuesday-morning tweets criticizing Ryan. Even if an electoral deluge next month submerges Trump, the GOP may not find his polarizing agenda as easy to wash away.