“What has really shaken me in recent weeks is the consistency in polling where I see Republican voters excusing really bad things because their leader has excused them,” she told me. “[Massachusetts Governor] Charlie Baker, [UN Ambassador] Nikki Haley, [Illinois Representative] Adam Kinzinger—I want to be in the party with them. But in the last few weeks it has become increasingly clear to me that most Republican voters are not in that camp. They are in the Trump camp.”

The portion of the party coalition willing to tolerate, if not actively embrace, white nationalism “is larger than most mainstream Republicans have ever been willing to grapple with,” she added.

Anderson’s gloom is understandable. Even before Trump’s emergence, the GOP relied mostly on the elements of American society most uneasy with cultural and demographic change—the primarily older, blue-collar, rural, and evangelical whites who make up what I’ve called the “coalition of restoration.” As a candidate and as president, Trump has yoked the party even more tightly to those voters’ priorities—a tilt evident in everything from his “very fine people” remarks about the white-supremacist protesters in Charlottesville to his recent pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.

All of this has predictably corroded Trump’s standing with the young people that Anderson has studied, both in her 2015 book The Selfie Vote and a perceptive post-2012 study for the College Republican National Committee. Her study reached much the same conclusion as the fabled “autopsy” that the Republican National Committee commissioned: that the GOP could court younger and diverse voters with a message of economic growth and government reform, but only if it embraced a more tolerant and inclusive vision on racial and cultural issues.

Given her perspective, Trump was never her choice in the 2016 primaries. But she didn’t exclude the possibility that in office he could reach a changing America. In February, she told me she thought Trump, as an outsider, could attract younger people with the growth and government-reform message she had championed in 2013—but only if he avoided decisions that would portray the GOP as intolerant and racially biased.

Now, though, Anderson sees Trump systematically advancing the most divisive elements of his agenda while slighting any reforms. “I cannot think of a worse possible direction we could be going,” she said glumly.

Polls showing Trump’s approval among young people falling to 25 percent or less justify her pessimism. And yet, as she noted, Trump’s approval among Republicans, while slightly eroding, remains at about 80 percent. Only one-fourth of GOP partisans criticized his handling of white-supremacist groups in a recent Quinnipiac University national survey.

All of this suggests that, as Anderson fears, any insurgency to define the GOP in more inclusive terms would face a tough climb. But it is nonetheless premature to declare Trump the permanent victor in the fight over the party’s direction.