Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were part of its foundation—but so was Minnesota, which Hillary Clinton won by just 45,000 votes after nearly a half-century of Democratic top-of-ticket dominance. Even Walter Mondale—who was also a native son—won Minnesota in Reagan’s 49-state 1984 reelection landslide. Despite that history as a blue state lodestar, Trump nearly pulled off a victory there that would have been the shocker of a shock election. His stunning near-miss—he fell short by just 1.5 percentage points despite spending limited money and attention there—has placed it high on the Trump reelection campaign wish list.

While the state’s demographics aren’t quite as favorable to Trump as those in several other nearby states, his campaign has already said it’s planning to pour up to $30 million into the state. That’s roughly 1000 times what it spent there in 2016. To show his resolve, the president has also visited the state a handful of times since capturing the White House.

In all of those Midwestern states, Trump assembled something like a reverse Obama coalition, marked by squeezing ever higher percentages and turnout from a shrinking white electorate. And he created a dilemma for Democrats over which path to pursue in the future: Focus on a map that prioritized the Obama coalition of young people, women and nonwhite voters, or double back to a more traditional map that prioritized winning the white working class.

The idea that Ohio might not be at the center of the presidential election universe seems preposterous at first. But Trump’s 8-point win in 2016 represented the widest GOP winning margin in a generation. Two years later, in what was nationally a great Democratic year, Ohio Republicans won every statewide executive office.

Billionaire Democratic candidate Tom Steyer publicly acknowledged what many in his party think privately during an October campaign stop in Columbus.

“You guys live in a red state,” he said. “I know people call it purple, but it’s pretty darn red.”

The key in Ohio, as in Iowa—another traditionally competitive state that doesn’t figure to be a core battleground this year—is the population of non-college educated whites, Trump’s demographic sweet spot. In Ohio, they made up 55 percent of the vote in 2016 and Trump won 63 percent of their vote, according to research by Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin for the Center for American Progress. In Iowa, non-college educated whites were 62 percent of voters and they delivered 57 percent of their ballots to Trump. At those levels, Trump can sustain some falloff in 2020 and still have a considerable advantage—a calculus that is likely to strip both states of their treasured designation as swing states.

Yet just as Trump created a dilemma for Democrats, he also created one for himself—and for future GOP nominees. His brand of populism and white grievance politics amped up rural turnout in key states, particularly in key Midwestern states where white, non-college voters cast more than half the vote in 2016. While that enabled Trump to pick off five states that Obama carried twice, it also planted an Electoral College time bomb, set to detonate after he leaves office. The president has tethered the party’s future to a shrinking population while at the same time accelerating the crack-up of the GOP’s suburban base and alienating Hispanic and minority voters in many states where the nonwhite share of the vote is growing.

These shifts are already shaping the contours of Trump’s reelection map. Virginia and Colorado—two states with significant populations of white, college educated voters and nonwhite voters—offer a look into that possible future. The Republican Party’s standing in the two states has nosedived in recent years, leaving both under near-complete Democratic control.