The story of the 2016 presidential election is simple. Donald J. Trump made huge gains among white voters without a college degree. His gains were large enough to cancel out considerable losses among well-educated white voters and a decade of demographic shifts.

There are questions and details still up for debate: whether Democrats can win back these voters, and how to think about and frame the decline in black turnout. But postelection surveys, pre-election surveys, voter file data and the actual results all support the main story: The voters who switched from President Obama to Mr. Trump were decisive.

Yet some still remain skeptical. A recent article in The Washington Post by Dana Milbank, “There’s No Such Thing as a Trump Democrat,” is the latest example. It argues, based on data from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, that there wasn’t an unusual defection of Democratic voters in 2016. The study found that 9.2 percent of Obama voters flipped to support Mr. Trump — a hair lower than the estimates from other surveys.

But the study also supports the conclusion about the pivotal nature of the Obama-Trump vote.

Mr. Milbank’s choice to use nationwide figures obscures the degree of the defection of white working-class voters from the Democrats to Mr. Trump. That shouldn’t be too surprising. After all, the national results would seem to make the 2016 election one of the least interesting in history. Hillary Clinton would be the president if the national tallies counted, and the shift from Mr. Obama’s 51.9 percent of the two-party popular vote to Mrs. Clinton’s 51.1 percent was the smallest change in major party vote share since 1888.