Because she led in the polls from the beginning of the race to the end, and because of assumptions, widely shared throughout the political world, about demographic trends in the United States, nearly everything I’ve written about this campaign until now was based on the assumption that Hillary Clinton would defeat Donald Trump for the presidency.

Much of it looks foolish now, of course. And there will be plenty of time for recrimination in the weeks and months ahead. How much of this upset was due to the political media’s obsession with Clinton’s email practices and to its underplaying of Trump’s proto-fascism? How much of it was the FBI director’s late intrusion into the presidential race, raising the alarmist and ultimately inaccurate sense that Clinton was guilty of a crime? How much of it was Republican-led voter suppression in states like North Carolina (enabled by John Roberts’s Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act)? How much of it was Gary Johnson and Jill Stein? How much of it was Clinton herself?

Whatever variables account for the polling failure, though, we have to accept that there was a great deal of truth to what the political analyst Sean Trende dubbed the “Missing White Voter” thesis—that every election year, in rural communities in the rust belt and the panhandle of Florida, millions of white people without college degrees just don’t vote.

The question was: What could the Republican Party, the natural home for that constituency, do to bring them back into the electorate?

We know the answer now, and it reflects horribly on the party and their new voters. What it took was a campaign of undisguised white nationalism—brash, unapologetic scapegoating of immigrants and Muslims. It took not only misogyny, but the endorsement of sexual assault. And it took Republicans who recognized their candidate’s recklessness, ignorance, and racism to decide that closing ranks around him was worth all of the dangers they knew they were inviting into the world, if it meant reclaiming political power.