And while Republicans are understandably euphoric that they will control the White House and both congressional chambers next year, neither party since 1968 has maintained such unified control for more than four consecutive years, a far more rapid turnover than in earlier generations. History suggests the best advice for Republicans now celebrating their unified control might be three simple words: Don’t unpack everything.

Yet Bannon and Trump have reason for optimism. While Trump did not establish new patterns in political allegiance, he did squeeze more advantage out of the old patterns than many, myself included, thought possible—and suffered less backlash from the groups most resistant to his coruscating message.

Trump dominated virtually every segment of blue-collar and non-urban white America: He not only beat Clinton among white men without a college education by more than Reagan beat Walter Mondale in his historic 1984 landslide, but he also equaled Reagan’s margin among non-college-educated white women. Even in households that included whites without a college degree who belonged to a labor union, Trump trounced Clinton by 58 percent to 32 percent, according to exit-poll figures provided by CNN’s polling unit. He crushed Clinton everywhere along the non-metropolitan continuum from mid-sized and small cities to rural hamlets. As important, Trump made these gains without losing as much ground among college-educated whites as polls predicted he would, while slightly improving over Romney’s anemic performance with non-white voters—at least according to exit polls, which are disputed by some minority analysts.

Yet all this still left Trump with no margin for error. He not only lost the popular vote, but also sealed his slim Electoral College victory with wins of about 1 point or less in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—the three loosest bricks in the Democrats’ “blue wall.” Trump’s hold on those states could easily slip in a future election if he loses any ground among the constituencies who supported him, or if he further alienates the ones who opposed him.

Maintaining his standing with both groups will test the dexterity of Trump and advisers like Bannon. In his Hollywood Reporter interview, Bannon insisted that he, and by extension his candidate, is “an economic nationalist” and not “a white nationalist.” Both Bannon and Trump have, in fact, championed economic-nationalist themes aimed at both foreign competitors and domestic elites. But the right-wing Breitbart website that Bannon formerly ran also unmistakably appealed to white racial anxieties with lurid articles hostile to immigrants, Muslims, and African Americans. Trump, starting as early as his campaign announcement speech—when he denounced undocumented Mexican immigrants as “criminals” and “rapists”—consistently struck more racially divisive notes than any presidential candidate since George Wallace.