John Hickenlooper, the term-limited Democratic governor, told me that when he goes to the East Coast, “I do feel like an outsider. The way we approach things here, it’s almost like we’re speaking a different language. In the West, I think there is an inclination, almost an instinct, to sit down with people you disagree with and sort of sort through” — as he did with the oil and gas industry to produce a rational energy policy, the nation’s first regulatory framework limiting future emissions.

Might he, eyeing 2020, run for the Democratic Party nomination for president on this can-do, bridge-building platform? “We are certainly looking at it,” Hickenlooper said. “We spent the summer talking to people that are really smart. I’m preparing, but don’t think I’d make a decision probably until February.”

That sounds to me like a yes. A Hickenlooper candidacy would be interesting because there’s no way to govern Colorado, as he has for eight years, without dealing with the way Trump has tapped into a deep-seated economic and cultural frustration. Trump support is no abstraction here, or cause for derision. It’s a fact.

Despite the strong economy, hardship is widespread. Wages have lagged. Some school districts, like Pueblo, have gone to a four-day week for lack of tax revenue. In rural areas, health insurance premiums have soared, sometimes 30 percent or more above Denver levels, because only one insurer remains. So people go without while others worry they will lose their Medicaid if they take a job. They clean bathrooms for billionaires in Telluride for a minimum wage.

“Just like the rest of the country, most people can’t easily afford housing, can’t easily afford health care, can’t easily afford higher education or early childhood education; so another way of saying that is most of the people cannot afford a middle-class lifestyle,” Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat (whose brother happens to run the Times Opinion section), told me.

The feeling of being left behind, forgotten or cheated by a rigged system in a country of sharpening inequality is America’s core dilemma. The question now is who will more effectively convince Americans that the American dream can be restored: Trump, with his unscrupulous rabble-rousing and America-first nationalism masking tax and other policies that favor the one percent, or a Democratic Party that rediscovers the ability to speak to small-town and blue-collar and barely middle-class America (like the teachers who went on strike in Colorado this year) in a way that does not sound patronizing?