The Hillary Clinton campaign made the decision early on to focus most of its attention on portraying Donald Trump as historically unfit for the office of the presidency. It was a strategy that appeared to be working, sending Trump’s unfavorability ratings into the stratosphere. At the same time, the campaign stuck to Clinton’s reputation, deserved or otherwise, for technocratic competence, leaving populist economic appeals to more credible surrogates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

This was, we now know, a colossal mistake. The problem for Clinton was that many of the voters who disliked Trump and thought he was thoroughly unqualified to be president voted for him anyway. There is now a widespread sense in the liberal press that, to combat the appeal of Trump’s drain-the-swamp populism, Clinton needed to make a populist pitch to the downscale white voters who turned out to be a pretty important lynchpin in the Democratic coalition, particularly in the Upper Midwest. “It’s very hard to argue that the struggle of everyday people on economic issues was a central part of her campaign,” longtime Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg told me. “It just wasn’t. It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t there. But she did not create a robust economic dialogue with working people.”

As the Democrats seek to put the pieces back together again, progressives and leftists are calling for a populist economic platform to be at the center of the party’s new agenda and identity. No less a figure than President Barack Obama appeared to ascribe to this idea. In his first press conference since Trump was elected, the president simultaneously laid out a new political playbook and subtweeted the Clinton campaign, saying, “The key for us—when I say ‘us,’ I mean Americans, but I think particularly for progressives—is to say your concerns are real, your anxieties are real; here’s how we fix them.” He added that Democrats, going forward, had to be “attentive to inequality and not tone deaf to it,” and had to reach out to “folks that are in communities that feel forgotten.”

But it’s one thing to embrace economic populism on a conceptual level, and quite another to translate it into a political platform and a governing agenda. To name just one issue: How does it square with the neoliberal championing of free trade, an issue in which Trump campaigned to the left of Clinton? Even Obama seemed to hedge on this issue, saying, “Yes to trade, but trade that ensures that these other countries that trade with us aren’t engaging in child labor, for example.”

For some Democrats, that won’t cut it. Jane Kleeb, who is the founder of Bold Nebraska and sits on Bernie Sanders’s post-election organization Our Revolution, said Democrats needed to do more to differentiate themselves from Republicans. “I think some Democrats have tried to run as Republican-lite and when a voter sees a Republican or a Democrat pretending to be a Republican they’re going to vote for the Republican,” she said. “So Democrats have to create a new path and show voters what it actually means to be Democrat again.”