Hillary Clinton’s loss has been called many things: a repu­di­a­tion of pro­gres­sivism, a man­date to repeal Oba­macare, the fail­ure of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, the begin­ning of a GOP crack­up, the shat­ter­ing of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty and so on.

"Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a total of about 107,000 votes. Their 46 electoral votes would have given her the presidency."

It’s tempt­ing to find such deep mean­ings in pres­i­den­tial elec­tions. So much is invest­ed in them and so much is at stake. But the imme­di­ate lessons we draw from them are often dif­fer­ent than history’s judg­ment. Con­sid­er the 1964 elec­tion, when Repub­li­cans won just six states and it looked as if the GOP, torn apart by a war between its far-right wing and the estab­lish­ment, would be in the wilder­ness for decades. Yet Repub­li­cans won five of the next six pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, includ­ing a near­ly clean sweep in 1972, when the Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­date won only one state.

Don­ald Trump’s win was noth­ing like that blowout. Clin­ton lost Michi­gan, Penn­syl­va­nia and Wis­con­sin by a total of about 107,000 votes. Their 46 elec­toral votes would have giv­en her the pres­i­den­cy. If she had won those states and 120,000 more votes in Flori­da, we would be dis­cussing a com­fort­able Clin­ton win. In oth­er words, few­er than 250,000 votes were the dif­fer­ence between two rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tives and interpretations.

So the basis for claim­ing that there is a deep mean­ing to what just hap­pened is weak indeed. Most of the election’s mean­ing is yet to be deter­mined, based on what the Trump admin­is­tra­tion becomes and how we respond. With those caveats in mind, there are some take­aways that seem like­ly to endure, even if they don’t hold up as main points in the years to come.

White work­ing class blues

The defec­tion of the white work­ing class from Democ­rats was real, espe­cial­ly in the cru­cial states of Michi­gan, Penn­syl­va­nia and Wis­con­sin. In those states, the most impor­tant fac­tor in Trump’s improve­ment on Mitt Romney’s per­for­mance was the shift among peo­ple with only a high school edu­ca­tion, and among peo­ple with some col­lege but not a bachelor’s degree. The effect was­n’t so much that it drove up turnout. Instead, it flipped just enough votes to turn the elec­tion. In Wis­con­sin, for exam­ple, Trump got rough­ly the same num­ber of votes as Rom­ney, but Clin­ton got about 230,000 few­er than Oba­ma in 2012. In Michi­gan, she got near­ly 300,000 few­er votes than Obama.

Trump’s pose as the voice of the work­ing class played a role in the defec­tions. But the shift was­n’t only about eco­nom­ic pain. It was also about the grow­ing cul­tur­al divide between rur­al and urban Amer­i­ca. Kather­ine Cramer, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, calls it ​“the pol­i­tics of resent­ment” in a recent book focused on Wis­con­sin. She notes that ​“in a pol­i­tics of resent­ment, peo­ple inter­twine eco­nom­ic con­sid­er­a­tions with social and cul­tur­al con­sid­er­a­tions in the inter­pre­ta­tion of the world they make with one another.”

The Clin­ton campaign’s air of enti­tle­ment hurt the can­di­date bad­ly on this front. It was­n’t just her ​“bas­ket of deplorables” com­ment. It was that she did­n’t show up at all in Wis­con­sin and hard­ly at all in Michi­gan. And she dis­ap­peared from the trail alto­geth­er for stretch­es, let­ting Trump set fire to his own cam­paign, sup­pos­ed­ly, while she ran up the score on the fundrais­ing front. The New York Times report­ed in ear­ly Sep­tem­ber that Clin­ton had spent much of the sum­mer par­ty­ing with the ​“ultra­rich” in the Hamp­tons, Bev­er­ly Hills and oth­er enclaves of privilege.

“Mrs. Clin­ton, who has promised to ​‘reshuf­fle the deck’ in favor of the mid­dle class and por­trayed Mr. Trump as an out-of-touch bil­lion­aire, has almost exclu­sive­ly been field­ing the con­cerns of the wealth­i­est Amer­i­cans,” the Times noted.

Rak­ing in big checks, for­ti­fy­ing its war chest and tak­ing com­fort in the polling, the cam­paign dis­played no sense of urgency about its leg­isla­tive agen­da. In the end, Clin­ton ran a slight­ly enhanced ver­sion of Jeb Bush’s ​“please clap” cam­paign: she was a can­di­date with a stel­lar resume and more mon­ey than she could use, but with­out a com­pelling mes­sage. That vac­u­um was reflect­ed in the turnout and in the lack of enthu­si­asm among Clinton’s base. While Oba­ma won the African-Amer­i­can vote by 87 points in 2012 and the His­pan­ic vote by 44 points, Clin­ton won those vot­ers by 80 points and 36 points, respectively.

“We don’t vote against some­body,” as Leslie Wimes, pres­i­dent of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic African-Amer­i­can Women Cau­cus, told Politi­co. ​“We vote for somebody.”

“ Charge the cockpit”

Moti­va­tion was nev­er an issue on the oth­er side. It hard­ly mat­tered to Repub­li­cans that much of Trump’s cam­paign was built on tra­di­tion­al­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic issues, such as his oppo­si­tion to trade deals and his ambi­tious infra­struc­ture plans. His sup­port­ers were ready to accom­pa­ny Trump, a per­fect vehi­cle for their resent­ments, on what­ev­er path he bar­reled down. The depth of the resent­ment on the Right occa­sion­al­ly broke through in scenes from his ral­lies: the vibe of bare­ly sup­pressed may­hem, some­times break­ing out into vio­lence. It was evi­dent, too, in the code-red alarms going off in the right-wing media through­out the campaign.

One small exam­ple: In ear­ly Sep­tem­ber, an anony­mous writer in Clare­mont Review of Books made the case for Trump based on the fact that he had ​“the right stances on the right issues — immi­gra­tion, trade, and war — right from the begin­ning.” The essay was titled ​“The Flight 93 Elec­tion” — a nod to the per­ceived urgency of the sit­u­a­tion. It began: ​“Charge the cock­pit or you die. You may die any­way. You — or the leader of your par­ty — may make it into the cock­pit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guar­an­tees.” The essay touched a nerve and went viral in con­ser­v­a­tive cir­cles. Rush Lim­baugh devot­ed an hour of his show to dis­cussing and rec­om­mend­ing it.

Clin­ton often told sup­port­ers that she was the only thing between them and the apoc­a­lypse. Now, in the after­math of the event, some ques­tions present them­selves. Is the Demo­c­ra­t­ic coali­tion sal­vage­able? What will the elec­tion of 2020 look like? 2024? What we will make, by then, of what just hap­pened? Will Trump’s nar­row vic­to­ry look like an aber­ra­tion — or the dawn of a new era? Who or what can stop the men who have just charged the cockpit?

The election’s mean­ing will emerge as such ques­tions are con­front­ed and answered over the next few months, years and decades. It will evolve from the ten­sion between Trump’s agen­da and our push­back. There are no guarantees.