On the Sunday evening before Election Day, as part of his eleventh-hour barnstorming tour, Donald Trump touched down on some of the most famously contentious political turf in the country. Macomb County—the big, overwhelmingly white, working-class suburb of Detroit—is currently embroiled in a lawsuit for blocking the construction of a mosque. It’s also home to the original “Reagan Democrat,” that once-prosperous union voter who abandoned the Democratic Party in the 1980s and upended the political map. The perfect place, in other words, for Trump to make a last-ditch appeal for support.

Unlike white voters down South, working-class voters across the Rust Belt ranged all over the electoral landscape after Reagan. Macomb backed Bill Clinton in the 1990s and voted twice for Barack Obama. But Hillary Clinton took Macomb’s support largely for granted, leaving working-class whites in the county—which lost more than half of its manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010—an easy target for Trump.

Trump was running late for his rally, but after Ted Nugent played for the 8,000 white voters in the Sterling Heights Amphitheater, they entertained themselves with chants of “CNN sucks!” and “Lock her up!” When the man himself arrived, he issued what would soon become a famous prophecy, the political equivalent of Babe Ruth’s home-run point or Joe Namath’s “guarantee” of a Super Bowl victory. The polls were either wrong or rigged, Trump thundered. “We’re going to go on Tuesday, and we’re going to win like they’ve never seen,” he vowed. “This is going to be Brexit-plus.”

When that expert-defying prediction came true, it looked like the Reagan Democrats had once again transformed the political map. Nationwide, Trump won working-class whites by a margin of more than two to one, outpacing Reagan’s historic highs in 1984. Across the Rust Belt, longtime Democratic strongholds flipped red. In Ohio, Trump won the blue-collar bastion of Trumbull County by six points, converting voters who had supported Obama by 22 points in 2012. In Pennsylvania, Trump narrowly lost working-class Lackawanna County, where Hillary Clinton’s father was born—but still pocketed 13,000 more votes than Mitt Romney did. And in Macomb itself, Trump won by double digits, capturing 33,000 more voters than Romney—nearly three times his razor-thin margin of victory statewide. Riding the blue-collar wave, Trump won Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—and his Electoral College margin of victory—by a total of just 110,000 votes.

The implication seemed clear: The election had been decided by working-class whites. It was “the revenge of the deplorables,” Bloomberg View proclaimed. Shocked Democrats immediately descended into finger pointing. Some blamed Clinton, a Washington insider running in an election fueled by populist anger. “The Democratic establishment is finished,” wrote Slate’s Jim Newell. “What a joke.” Others called on the party to rethink its entire strategy. Within days, The Washington Post reported, Sanders and other liberal activists were pushing to transform the Democratic Party into “an advocate for working-class voters.” Sanders supporters pointed to his victories over Clinton in Michigan and Wisconsin—Trump-style upsets fueled by heavy white majorities—as evidence that the party needed a whole new focus on blue-collar voters screwed by free trade and Wall Street.