A week ago, I wrote a column saying Hillary Clinton had the election in the bag. And that was before a seeming avalanche of negative news about Donald Trump, most notably the audiotape of his bragging about grabbing women without their consent. Prediction markets are now pricing in probabilities well north of 85% that the former secretary of state will be the next president.

But while Trump spends his campaign’s final days sending as many salvos at his own party’s highest-ranking elected official as he has at Clinton, the underlying politics he’s employed seems available for another candidate to, um, grab.

Trump started his campaign with a broadside against immigration and trade. And while the manner in which he did so may have doomed his chances of winning the White House from the start — by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” — the data shows he was simply tapping fertile ground.

Some three-quarters of voters say undocumented immigrants who meet certain requirements should be able to stay in the U.S., according to Pew Research conducted back in March. But during the Republican primaries, only 47% of Trump supporters agreed, which was the lowest percentage of any candidate. (It’s a question that got the agreement 58% of Ted Cruz supporters, 75% of John Kasich supporters, 87% of Clinton supporters and 90% of Bernie Sanders supporters.)

Pew data from August shows that two-thirds of Trump supporters think immigration is “a very big problem,” while only 17% of Clinton supporters did.

Also read:Why so few Americans are now applying for jobless benefits

The exit polls from the primaries show a similar tilt. In the key state of Pennsylvania, Trump’s Republican supporters overwhelmingly called immigration the most important issue, and more of his supporters said foreign trade took away U.S. jobs than created it.

Clinton’s supporters in the Keystone State, by contrast, said foreign trade created more jobs than it takes away.

So the question then is not so much, what do Trump voters think, but rather, are they feeling this way because of the Republican presidential nominee, or despite him?

Even acknowledging Trump’s ability to rally his supporters, the underlying economic data suggest the latter. Consider this overlooked report by the Congressional Budget Office — the short version is, recent trade deals have given a tiny boost to the broader U.S. economy, at the expense of deep harm for the workers most affected.

Also read:CBO on trade deals: ‘Relatively small’ boost, but ‘substantial hardship’ for some workers

Or look at this paper from Alan Krueger, a onetime chairman of the Obama White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, to be presented at a Boston Fed conference on Friday. He points out that participation in the labor force for prime-age men has been declining for decades, and half of those men not in the labor force are taking pain medication on a daily basis.

Krueger doesn’t touch on the opioid epidemic that has led to skyrocketing heroin use, or whether unemployment was the cause or symptom. But what is obvious is that the trend doesn’t seem likely to quickly reverse itself, and the visibility of that joblessness is a key motivator for those who back Trump.

By now, the data is well known. Participation in the labor force is dropping, and not only because baby boomers are retiring. Even with a nice bump last year, median household incomes are languishing. Consumers remain wary.

No wonder Trump’s message that elites have ignored their plights — “never winning,” in the tycoon’s words — has struck a resonant chord.

Now, is there another candidate who can capitalize on these sensitivities as well as Trump? That’s a fair question. His running mate, Mike Pence, doesn’t have the same history of economic populism and likely will run away from those policies once his boss’s candidacy ends. Cruz and Marco Rubio and some of the other names that will be bandied about for 2020 also aren’t trusted by the anti-immigration and anti-trade crowd.

But nature abhors a vacuum, and it just seems improbable that no one will take up the ground currently occupied by Trump. Most of the other major industrialized nations, such as the U.K., France and Germany, have seen the popularity of similarly nativist parties rocket, as witnessed most vividly by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union and the new tone of Britain’s Conservative Party, that for example now wants companies to identify the proportion of foreign workers it employs.

There’s even the possibility, small that it may be, that Trump himself would give it another try.

Inward vs. outward has been the dividing line of this campaign, as the flood of former Bush administration officials backing Clinton and resisting their own party’s nominee has clearly shown. Short of an economic transformation, that’s likely the case for years to come.