For a long time in American politics, you could pretty well guess how someone would vote by their income. Poor people generally supported Democrats; rich people voted Republican. This was true even among whites: In every presidential election since at least 1948, wealthy whites have been notably more Republican than the rest of the white electorate. And throughout the twentieth century, poor whites identified much more strongly with the Democrats than other whites. For decades, a good rule of thumb was: The greener your bank account, the redder your vote.

Then came Donald Trump, and the equation shifted. In last year’s election, according to an analysis by political scientist Tom Wood, 61 percent of the poorest whites—those in the bottom third of income distribution—voted for Trump. By contrast, in the top 4 percent of income distribution, just 42 percent of whites supported Trump. Among whites, millionaires decisively rejected their fellow millionaire, while blue-collar voters embraced him.

What drove the vote in 2016 was not income, but identity. Trump won by appealing directly to the cultural anxieties of downscale whites: He told them he’d do something about the immigrants who were stealing their jobs and the Muslims who were plotting to blow us up. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, appeared to dismiss working-class whites as “deplorables,” and put on a convention that was a paean to multiculturalism. As both parties made appeals based more on race and culture than on class and economic inequality, almost 10 percent of voters who cast their ballots for Barack Obama in 2012 decided to abandon the Democrats. The famed blue wall that ran through the Rust Belt came crashing down, and Trump walked over the rubble straight into the Oval Office.

Since the election, Clinton has often been blamed for focusing too much on “identity politics.” But the suggestion that Democrats return to the populist economic rhetoric that made them heroes of the working class ignores the current political reality. The cultural forces that swayed the election in favor of Trump are likely to remain. What doomed Clinton, in the end, was not that she appealed to racial and ethnic minorities, but that she paid them little more than lip service. As Democrats attempt to move forward, they must come to grips with the fact that many of the working-class whites who abandoned the party are likely gone for good. The sooner they accept that reality, the sooner they can win with the coalition they have.

From 1932 to 1964, Democrats were America’s majority party. They consistently held the White House and Congress, with few interruptions, because they were the party of the working class, and millions of Americans directly benefited from the social welfare programs they stood for.