Last week there was a report that came out showing that Republican candidates who have made overt racist appeals have a really bad record. Of 46 candidates who ran on explicitly anti-Muslim platforms, only 2 won, a rate of about 4%.

This may sound surprising given that we seem to be living in a time dominated by racially charged right wing populism in America, Europe and elsewhere, but it really isn’t. Attempts to recreate the success of Trumpism have failed pretty consistently. And in fact, if you go back to the results in 2016 you can see it was probably a net loser for Trump as well.

“But wait” you may be thinking, “Don’t we have piles of research that proves that racial resentment was a big motivator for people who voted for Trump?”

Yes, we do, and it does help illustrate the fact that the appeal of Trumpism is primarily based on stoking ethnic resentments. But that doesn’t mean Trump won because he stoked ethnic resentments. Yes, some people DID vote for him because of it, but others DID NOT, and on balance the second group was probably larger than the former.

Take the most recent piece of research people have pointed to as evidence of Trump’s racial appeal. They do identify racial resent as a major driver in white voting behavior, but it was a two way street. Many Obama-Trump voters went for Trump because of them, but there were also Romney-Clinton voters and Romney-Third Party voters who found it a turnoff. By that same token, there were assumably a number of Obama-Nonvoters and Romney-Nonvoters who Trump could have won but didn’t, and other mostly young first time voters who didn’t care for him either.

So how did that work out for Trump on balance?

Well if exit polls are to believed, pretty badly. For all his appeals to white resentments Trump didn’t do much better with white voters than Romney had. He got perhaps half a million more white votes than Romney. If you look at the results for every racial demographic, he actually netted more non-white voters.

The problem for Trump was that he actually did lose a lot of support. Going by estimates Larry Sabato gives, of the 60 million people who voted for Romney only 41 million went on to vote for Trump, a drop off of 19 million. A lot of this was doubtlessly just natural turnover, but even taking that into account that’s still a pretty big loss. By contrast, Clinton kept about 52 million of the 65 million who went for Obama in 2012. Even if we assume Obama-Trump voters were all uniformly won over by racist rhetoric, at best they were just filling the hole create by people who seemed to be turned off by it.

This is the biggest reason why Republicans have been unsuccessful recreating Trump’s success: there was never much success to begin with.

My point here isn’t to dismiss the relevance of racial and xenophobic sentiments in modern politics. Quite the opposite, if we imagine ethnic resentments to be some sort of exogenous, overwhelming force in politics, that eventually leads to the conclusion that the only way to win is to acquiesce to it on some level. That’s basically the track Matt Yglesias took in a particularly frustrating piece recently. While at first he seems to frame his argument as a rejection of racially based right wing populism, a closer reading shows he’s actually nixing the idea of non-racially based left wing economic populism because he thinks racial resentments are the order of the day. He doesn’t actually have an answer to those racial resentments; though he seems to imply not pushing immigration reform too hard may side step it. That’s a pretty bleak assessment.

Fortunately it’s also wrong. Anti-Immigrant demagoguery and dog whistles may speak to a lot of base voters on the right, but not the electorate at large. And if it becomes too overt, or gets out of hand it can blow up in a candidate’s face (and with the MAGA bomber, this turn of phrase is now depressingly literal). Far from being some over powering trump card in American politics, playing to racial resentments is at best a risky strategy and the Republicans are still making a grievous error by basing their long term strategy on it. Conversely, we can combat racism and xenophobia aggressively without having to presume that we’ll run afoul of mass popular bigotry.

Of course, this shouldn’t be taken as a reason to become complacent either. Part of the problem in 2016 was that people presumed the backlash against Trump’s racism was a given and that it would lead people to vote for Clinton to stop it. It wasn’t. You still need to do outreach to make your case. Moreover, you need to have a convincing argument for why you’re better. Few people buy Trump’s racially charged diagnosis for their problems, but some people still find it better than nothing. Even those who thought nothing was the better answer, they still didn’t think it was good enough to go out of their way support .

This is to say, you can’t simply expect to win by default. Nor is appearing to be more level headed and normal an answer to Trumpism either.