The Democrats are flipping one seat after another in the Trump era, and yet, they’re still re-litigating 2016. The latest entry in this ongoing debate pits liberal think-tanker Sean McElwee and three political scientists, who argue that the Democratic Party can retake the White House by courting the predominantly young and black former Obama voters who stayed home in 2016, against New York Times election expert Nate Cohn, who argues that the Democrats must instead win back the blue-collar whites who flipped from Obama to Trump.

But the respective paths laid out by McElwee et al. and Cohn aren’t mutually exclusive. The way out of the Gordian Knot of identity politics versus class politics is to take intersectionality seriously. Instead of pitting voters of color against white working-class voters in an imaginary election, Democrats should target their policy proposals and political appeals to voters who bridge the gap: the black working class.

Reaching this predominantly young and disaffected group will mean ignoring calls for Democrats to tone down the party’s newfound commitment to social justice. It’ll also mean embracing the type of full-throated economic populism that the party has shied away from ever since its post-McGovern “neoliberal” turn. The one thing Democrats must not do is continue moderating their party’s message, especially on economics, in the hope that upscale whites will save them.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign (in)famously pursued educated suburban moderates, who it believed would be turned off by Trump’s coarseness. “For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two or three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia,” Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, told The Washington Post in July. “The voters who are most out there figuring out what to do are not the blue-collar Democrats. They are the college-educated Republicans or independents who lean Republican in the suburbs.”

In explicitly targeting college-educated whites, Clinton’s 2016 campaign was the apotheosis of decades of attempts by New Democrats to woo the “rising learning class” of “wired workers” and suburban “soccer moms.” While this centrist strategy failed to deliver Democrats the White House in the tossup elections of 2000 and 2004, it succeeded in hastening the class inversion of the Democrats, as the party shed blue-collar whites for white-collar ones.