The widespread discussion about the gender gap can obscure more than it illuminates. Since the 1980s, Democratic presidential candidates have consistently run better among women than among men—or put the other way, Republicans have run better with men than women. This pattern has held among whites, African Americans, and Hispanics.

But the magnitude of the gender gap is inflated by Democrats’ overwhelming advantage among women of color. President Obama, for instance won exactly 96 percent of African American women, and over two-thirds of Hispanic women, in each of his two victories. Democrats haven’t done nearly as well among white women. In modern exit polling tracing back to 1972, the only Democrat to win more white women than his Republican opponent was Bill Clinton in 1996. Clinton in 1992 and Al Gore in 2000 also ran about even with white women. But since then, the GOP has carried white women by solid margins: 11 points in 2004, seven in 2008, and fully 14 for Mitt Romney against Obama in 2012.

Romney last time carried white men by an even more emphatic 27-point margin (the Republicans’ best showing since 1988). Yet because of his crushing advantage among the growing minority population, Obama still won reelection by 5 million votes.

That precedent frames the challenge facing Trump, now the inevitable GOP nominee. Following long-term trends, it’s likely that minorities will cast 30 percent of the 2016 vote, and white women will comprise slightly more of the remainder than white men—just as in 2012. In his absolute best-case scenario, Trump might match the two-thirds of white men that Reagan won in 1984, the party’s modern apex. But given Trump’s astronomical unfavorable ratings among African Americans and Hispanics, it’s not unreasonable to project that Clinton could hold the roughly 80 percent of minority voters who have typically backed Democratic nominees since 1976.

If both those projections held true, and the electorate’s composition followed the long-term patterns, Trump would then need to attract 58 percent of white women to reach a national majority—slightly more than the 56 percent that Romney won. Looking at the equation from the other direction, if Clinton matched the usual Democratic performance with non-white voters and also carried even half of white women, Trump would then need to win more than three-fourths of white men for a national majority, a daunting prospect.