If the two sides fight to a draw on economic issues, the bourgeois intersectionality of the Democrats gives the Republicans an edge with the white working class.

But we must keep our minds open to the prospect of a surprise. Exogenous shocks to our political system are unpredictable in any moment but inevitable over time. The Great Depression ended three decades (interrupted only by the Wilson presidency) of Republican dominance among the white working class. Who’s to say that something like that might not happen again?

We also must not discount political entrepreneurship. How surprised must Adlai Stevenson have been to lose so much of the white working class in 1952! The New Deal had supposedly grafted these voters to the Democratic party for a generation, yet Dwight Eisenhower managed a spectacular vivisection. His running mate, Richard Nixon, would pull off a similar operation 20 years later. One of the reasons that politics is so interesting is that demographics is not destiny — creative politicians can discover new issues to exploit or interesting ways to reframe old issues, shattering our preconceived notions. Indeed, I would say that most presidents in the post-war era, from Truman to Trump, have been surprising in one way or another.