But here’s what’s odd about this year: Though we’ll continue to talk a lot about the economy, it may matter less than it ever has in determining who becomes the next president.

For many years, political scientists have noted that with just a few data points, most importantly on the economy, you can predict with a high degree of accuracy who’s going to win the presidential election. Different models have used different measures (the unemployment rate, GDP, income growth), and they often add in a measure of presidential approval, but the results have long suggested that no single factor is as important as the economy.

This year, many of those models are predicting that Trump will win. Which is a little hard to reconcile at the moment when you look at what’s happening with the polls. For instance, Alan Abramowitz’s highly successful “time for a change” model, which includes how long the party in power has held the White House and has predicted the winner of the national popular vote in every presidential election since 1988, predicts a Trump victory. But Abramowitz himself doesn’t think it’s true, not because there’s something wrong with the data, but because those few independent variables can’t account for Trump.

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Now let me refer you to this post from Michael Tesler in Monkey Cage, where using survey data from the past couple of elections, he notes that while the state of the economy matters a great deal for white voters, the same isn’t true for nonwhites:

Not surprisingly, positive perceptions of the economy were strongly correlated with white respondents’ support for the Democratic candidates. But that correlation was considerably weaker for Latinos and especially African-Americans. Less than 20 percent of whites who thought the economy was getting worse supported Obama and Clinton in 2012 and 2016. Meanwhile, nearly half of Latinos and 85 percent of African-Americans who thought the economy was getting worse still supported the Democratic candidates.

That means that over time, the predictive power of the economy is going to decrease, because nonwhites loyal to the Democratic Party are rapidly growing as a proportion of the electorate. In 1980, they made up 12 percent of the voters. In 2000, it was 19 percent. And in 2016, most projections say that nonwhites will make up around 31 percent of voters.

One of the unknowns about the impact of this most unusual campaign is whether it will create beliefs and conclusions among voters that persist long after it’s over. Will we see a generation of minority voters who are so turned off by Trump that they become Democrats for good? Is it possible that Latinos and Asian Americans (the fastest-growing minority group) could become nearly as loyal to the Democrats as African Americans are?

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That would obviously be disastrous for the GOP, but a lot could depend on what happens between now and 2020. If Trump loses, the next four years could be a replay of the past eight: a Republican Party focused on obstructing a Democratic president, pushed by its base to become ever more conservative, and eventually running a presidential primary race where the winner is the candidate most able to activate an angry electorate cheered by appeals to white nationalism. If it happens for a second time in a row, that could take the trends we see this year and cast them in stone. Or we could see a broad realization on Republicans’ part that something has to change, and the party could genuinely reach out to minorities and nominate someone for president with a much broader appeal. Either scenario is possible.

But at the moment, given both demographic changes and our increasing partisan polarization, it appears that while the economy still matters to presidential races, it may matter only when it’s in an extreme state. If we’re in a spectacular boom or a miserable recession when Election Day rolls around, then the outcome of the presidential race will still be a foregone conclusion. But if the economy is in that middle range where it spends most of its time, and where it is now — not great but not terrible, with the picture looking different depending on which measure you’re using — then there’s more room for the candidates to control their own fates.