Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in part because his primary campaign message was far more in tune with an angry electorate than that of his rivals. However, Trump’s winning campaign was also helped mightily by a “Fatal Eight” set of miscalculations made by the opposition.

These key mistakes included treating Trump as a mere celebrity rather than a serious candidate, failing to strategically attack the fledgling Trump candidacy in its crib, refusing to recognize that a candidate with a solid base can win in a crowded field even with negatives polling well above 50 percent, and assuming that evangelicals and self-identified conservatives would shun the thrice-married and socially moderate New Yorker.

Today, political elites on both sides of the aisle are once again weaving together a compelling set of “Never Trump” narratives that, taken together, predict a twenty-first-century Goldwater lamb being devoured by a Clinton lion. The question, of course, is whether these elites will finally get it right and turn Trump into an embarrassing historical footnote—or once again be spectacularly wrong. The answer will inevitably hinge on whether each of these “Seven Pillars of Beltway Wisdom” turn out to be on point—or wildly off the mark.

#1: National Polls Point to a Hillary Win

Democrat Hillary Clinton leads Republican Donald Trump in some of the most diverse battleground states - including by double digits in two of them - according to four brand-new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist polls. — NBC News, August 12, 2016

The conventional wisdom says Trump faces a steep uphill battle in which he must hold on to every red state Mitt Romney won in 2012, and then run the Rust Belt table in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Obama handily won all four in 2012. If Trump can turn the Rust Belt states while keeping the states Romney won in 2012, that alone is enough to get to the winning magic number of 270 electoral votes. And that may well be doable, because Trump’s strength on the trade issue in the Rust Belt is mirrored by Clinton’s weakness. She was thumped by Bernie Sanders in Michigan and Wisconsin; Trump ran stronger than Clinton in Pennsylvania, and some early polls show a very close race in the perennial swing state of Ohio.

Even outside the Rust Belt, Trump’s independent-friendly and likely centrist campaign may have the power to significantly redraw the traditional blue, red, and swing state map. Trump could be the first Republican to take “Live Free or Die” New Hampshire since 2000—four Electoral College votes there. Nevada and its six votes last went Republican in 2004, but the Silver State may also have a real affinity for a casino/hotel mogul with major properties in the state.

Trump might even force Clinton to spend time and money defending her position in their mutual home state of New York, with its a whopping twenty-nine Electoral College votes. Bringing New York into contention would be a “yuge” game-changer, as the last Republican to win there was Reagan in 1984. Romney lost New York to Obama by nearly thirty percentage points in 2012.

Most important of all, Trump should run better than recent Republican presidential candidates in Florida, the mother of all swing states. This is Trump’s adopted second home, where he trounced “favorite son” Marco Rubio in the primary. With Trump at the top of the ticket, Republicans at least have a fighting chance to score Florida’s twenty-nine electoral votes, since Trump got almost exactly the same number of primary votes as Clinton.

The conventional wisdom that has Trump losing badly in Florida because of his tough stand on immigration might not be well-received by the state’s rapidly rising share of Hispanic voters. Which brings us to our next piece of conventional wisdom.

#2: Clinton Will Run Up The “Tear Down That Wall Mr. Trump” Hispanic Vote

According to the most recent Gallup poll . . . 77 percent of Hispanics view Mr. Trump unfavorably. . . . Despite calling for a “big, beautiful” wall at the Southern border (which Mexico will pay for), the deportation of all illegal immigrants, and labeling some Mexicans rapists and drug dealers, businessman Donald Trump won more than half of the GOP Hispanic vote in New York City. — Kelly Riddell, Washington Times, April 20, 2016

The inherent contradiction in Riddell’s reporting—bad Hispanic poll numbers for Trump, great election results—injects a much higher degree of uncertainty into Clinton’s actual level of Hispanic support than Trump’s rhetoric might suggest. What is certain, however, is that the Hispanic vote will be a major determiner of the general-election outcome.

Since passage of the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the nation’s foreign-born population has ballooned from ten million to an astonishing forty-five million immigrants. Today, as a result of this immigration tsunami, whites have fallen from 85 percent of the population to 62 percent, while the Hispanic share has risen from 4 percent to 18 percent.

Meanwhile, Latino support for Republican presidential candidates has been in free fall—from George W. Bush’s 44 percent in 2004 and John McCain’s 31 percent in 2008 to Romney’s 27 percent in 2012. That falling Republican share of a rising Hispanic voting bloc may indeed make it impossible for Trump to even compete in red-leaning Hispanic-rich states like Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada—or so the conventional wisdom goes.

This particular conventional wisdom is based, however, on the arguably flawed assumptions that Hispanics monolithically support an open border and view immigration as their top issue. Au contraire, says Brian Joondeph from American Thinker, citing these poll results:

“Immigration ranked fifth in importance to registered Latino voters, behind education, jobs, healthcare, and the deficit. These are core conservative issues and will attract more voters than running on amnesty and ignoring economic issues. In fact, more than half, ‘of Latino registered voters say they would vote for a candidate who disagrees with them on immigration policy if that candidate agrees with them on most other issues.’”

There may indeed be a wedge opening here for Trump—and one not without this irony: he will be the first nominee for president in history who, with his various casino and hotel properties, has actually employed tens of thousands of Hispanics.

Trump’s message will be simple: “I will not only create new jobs at decent wages for you with my economic and trade policies. I will prevent illegals from taking your job and driving down your wages with my immigration plan.” In fact, this is a message that may resonate across what many claim to be Trump’s yawning chasm of a racial divide. Enter our next pillar of conventional Beltway wisdom about the black vote.

#3: Clinton Will Command the Black Vote

“Black folk having been voting democrat for the last 70 years and we don't have s**t to show for it . . . Hillary talks to black people as if we’re children or pets . . . Trump just wants the U.S to be lavish . . . for all of us. I can f— with that.”— Rapper Azealia Banks tweets her Trump support, May 8, 2016

Statistics scream the Democratic Party has a hammerlock on the black vote. Obama won it in 2008 with 99 percent and again in 2012 with 95 percent. And it hardly takes a black Democratic face to get over 90 percent—Kerry, Gore and Bill Clinton all did it, dating back to 1992.

That said, Obama will leave office with his daughter on the way to Harvard while much of the rest of America’s black youth are more worried about bail than Yale. As PJ Media’s Roger Simon warns:

“The African-American community is in a miserable condition that has been getting worse for decades and has reached its nadir under Obama -- two-parent families disappearing, unemployment rates skyrocketing, incarceration rates catastrophic, drug addiction epidemic. We all look on in despair as gang members shoot children in the streets of Chicago and murders -- almost all black-on-black -- proliferate in Baltimore after years of decline.”

Trump will bluntly ask black (and brown) Americans whether they are more interested in more welfare checks and food stamps, which Hillary Clinton will happily supply, or whether they want the kind of job opportunities and rising wages a Trump presidency will offer. This prospect alone scares black liberals like Tavis Smiley, who warns:

“If Donald Trump is indeed the Republican nominee, it might be a miscalculation for Democrats to take for granted that black voters are a lock for their nominee, even with the [so-called] first black president [Bill Clinton] and Barack Obama both campaigning for her.”

Trump might also tap at the resentment blacks have for the wave of illegal immigration that has pushed blacks out of lower end jobs and suppressed wages. As National Review’s A. J. Delgado notes:

“The black unemployment rate is almost 11 percent, far higher than that of any other group profiled by labor statistics. African Americans are disproportionately employed in lower-skilled jobs—the very same jobs immigrants take.”

The hard Trump truth here is that no segment of America—from Southeast San Diego to the slums of Miami’s Liberty City—has suffered more from a flood of illegal immigrants taking their jobs and depressing their wages than from lower-income African-Americans. Notes U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow:

“Immigration accounts for 40 percent of the 18-point percentage decline in black employment levels in the last several years [and] an 18-point decline is hundreds of thousands of blacks without jobs. . . . In addition to depressing black employment levels, illegal immigration—frankly any low-skilled immigration—tends to drive down the wages of jobs that are available for black Americans.”

That’s why Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera sees gold for Trump at the end of the racial rainbow:

“Trump may get as much as 25 percent of the African American vote. . . . He’s anti-immigration, the immigrants perceived by black Americans to being in direct competition to them.”

#4: Big Labor Will Carry Hillary

“This TPP sets the gold standard . . . to open free, transparent, fair trade.” — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, November 15, 2012

“Americans’ anger should be directed . . . not at Muslims or Hispanics. But at any politician who would vote to approve this proposal to further lower their wages, destroy their jobs and diminish their economic opportunity.” — Leo Gerard, International President, United Steelworkers, December 14, 2015

Big labor has been as slavishly dependable as the black vote in backing Democratic presidential nominees. This goes all the way back to the days of FDR’s New Deal, and conventional wisdom has it that history will surely repeat.

This may well be true, but the far more salient question is whether union leaders can dissuade large swaths of their rank and file from defecting to Trump—much the same way blue-collar union workers once moved en masse against their leadership to the Reagan Democrat camp.

The two key canaries in this pivotal poll mine are Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, and Leo Gerard, who oversees the powerful United Steelworkers. Gerard has dismissed Trump as a “private-jet-owning one percenter” who would rather blame Muslims and Hispanics. Trumka has warned “a President Trump would spell disaster for the working class” and dismissed him as “a house of cards.”

These Trump roasts notwithstanding, both Trumka and Gerard have been burned multiple times by the Clinton brand. Bill Clinton signed Big Labor’s Antichrist of NAFTA in 1993, and Hillary lobbied Congress for it as first lady. Bill Clinton shoehorned China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, while then AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Trumka was correctly warning from the steps of Capitol Hill that the deal would decimate American manufacturing. And it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who engineered the passage of a 2012 South Korean trade pact that has almost doubled America’s trade deficit with South Korea while destroying seventy-five thousand American jobs—Gerard has called it “putrid pie in the sky” resulting in “more jobs lost” and “no exports gained.”

Ultimately, the real question may not be whether the leaders of Big Labor support Clinton but rather how many of their own rank and file desert her, given that Trump’s advocacy for cracking down on unfair trade practices is so perfectly aligned with labor interests. In sharp contrast, the best a “trust-me” Hillary Clinton can promise across the union halls of America is that after betraying labor on NAFTA, China’s entry into the WTO, the South Korean trade pact and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, she won’t stick a knife in labor’s back yet a fifth time.

#5: Clinton Will Bury Trump with the Women’s Vote

“The 2016 vote is going to show the largest gender gap of any election in our history.” — Paul Waldman, Washington Post, March 17, 2016

This may be the most violent battle of the sexes ever witnessed in politics—the presidential election equivalent of Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in The War of the Roses. The central question is whether the male tidal wave that continues to build for Trump can wash over any corresponding female tide for Clinton.

In both the 2008 and 2012 elections, Obama captured 57 percent of the women’s vote. In this election year, Hillary may well break the 60 percent barrier for the first time since Lyndon Johnson did it against Barry Goldwater. That’s another key pillar of the conventional Beltway wisdom predicting that Hillary will win in a landslide.

But suppose an even greater percentage of men break for Trump? Clinton’s major “trust problem” extends even to women. That alone may hold down her numbers among women voters relative to a generic candidate vying to be the first female president of the land.

The Trump standard for running up the male vote here may well be Ronald Reagan, who captured 59 percent of that demographic in his trouncing of Walter Mondale in 1984—and Trump could surpass the 63 percent mark hit by Richard Nixon’s burying of George McGovern back in 1972. We will be looking at a major upset if Trump’s men turn out in record numbers while Hillary’s female support turns out to be indeed less ardent than expected.

#6: The Disloyal Republican Opposition Will Sink Trump’s Campaign

“My hope is that Trump will lose by a landslide, and the party will come to its senses.” — Max Boot, May 8, 2016

“Those conservative writers and thinkers who have for nine months warned the base that Mr. Trump is not a conservative should consider the idea that a large portion of the Republican base no longer sees itself as conservative, at least as that term has been defined the past 15 years by Washington writers and thinkers.” — Peggy Noonan, April 28, 2016

The battle going on for hearts and minds of the Republican Party intelligentsia is well bracketed by Boot’s defeatism, juxtaposed against the evolution of Noonan’s thinking over the course of the Trump campaign.

From Day One, self-anointed keepers of the neoconservative flame, like Boot, Rich Lowry at National Review, John Podhoretz at Commentary, William Kristol at the Weekly Standard, and Karl Rove and Paul Gigot at the Wall Street Journal, have unmercifully flayed Trump as a closet liberal given his renunciation of neocon causes like free trade and Bush’s Middle East wars.

In sharp contrast, Peggy Noonan’s thinking has clearly evolved in considering that the fault may lie more with the Beltway commentariat’s stunning misperception of what matters to real voters in that vast stretch of “flyover country” between Georgetown and Beverly Hills. Ultimately, the outcome of Peggy Noonan’s intellectual struggle may be a far better leading indicator of a Trump defeat or victory in November than the rants of neocons increasingly out of touch with an American anger that their very own flawed policies helped spawn.

For his part, Trump has not sought to politely cleanse the likes of National Review, Commentary, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal of its affinities for free trade, open borders and nation building, but rather give these stiff neocons a full-scale enema. No wonder they both hate and fear him. The only remaining question is whether they can mortally wound him.

In this Republican “Never Trump” vein, there is also the chorus of establishment politicians who continue to rain invective down upon Trump—to the delight of the Clintonites and Democratic Party. The most high-profile of these Republican Clintonians include a Mount Rushmore of failed presidential candidates: Mitt, Jeb, Ted, and the two Johns—Kasich and McCain. It’s an open question as to whether the Republican base will heed the warnings from this usual suspects or see them as just a bowlful of traitorous sour grapes.

#7: Loose Lips Sink Campaign Ships

“There is a frustration that he is playing by different rules, but there is a belief that it has got to catch up to him.” — a Clinton Aide to the Financial Times, May 11, 2016

One of the biggest mistakes of both the political elites and Trump’s opponents during the Primary Election was to assume that Trump’s “beautiful wall,” “ban on Muslims” and “bomb the shit out of them” rhetoric was costing him votes rather than addressing the gut-level angst of Republican voters. Still, this conventional wisdom lives on.

The working assumption amongst much of the media (as well as the Clinton campaign apparatchiks) is that Trump’s unscripted comments will eventually cause his candidacy to implode. The only question is when—and which journalist or issue wins the Trump dead pool.

This “loose lips sink campaign ships” presumption is debatable. After all, much of Trump’s popularity stems from his willingness to say what he thinks, even (or especially) if it offends the politically correct. It was precisely his shoot-from-the-lip candor that resulted in the largest number of Republicans ever voting for a candidate in a presidential primary—and we can expect massive Republican, Independent and Reagan Democrat turnout for Trump and his candor.

That said, if Trump simply stays focused on his four aces of the economy, trade, immigration and national security, it is equally true that he will surely play a winning hand. On the other hand, if reporters or the Clinton campaign are able to take Trump off message, his four aces may be beaten by a full house of spin.

Here, Trump should fully expect Hillary’s “bait machine” to try and draw attention away both from Trump’s winning issues and Hillary’s own mounting scandals. In fact, in recent weeks, the Clinton-Kaine spin doctors have been running this form of psych ops hard—and the media has thus far been gullible enough to quickly take Clinton’s bait.

For example, during the August 8 week of the dueling Trump-Clinton economic speeches, the Clinton campaign, with big assists from the liberal press, was at least partially successful in diverting attention away from her failed economic and trade policies and her corruption scandals. All Clinton had to do was chum the media waters with her tax returns, and demand that Trump release his, and the game swiftly morphed from policy to politics.

The most important strategic rule in this race may, therefore, be this: whichever campaign best controls the news cycle will win the race.

At this point, the only thing certain about this election is that it will deeply and truly matter. This is a hundred-year flood conjuring up everything from Andrew Jackson’s 1828 “rise of the common man” and Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 “Bull Moose” run at Woodrow Wilson to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal win in 1932, which completely redrew the political party landscape. A record number of voters will likely show up for this showdown—and Trump has a very good chance of winning once one really assesses the chessboard.

Peter Navarro is a professor at the University of California-Irvine and a senior policy advisor to the Trump campaign. He is the author of Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World (Prometheus Books) and director of the companion Crouching Tiger documentary film series.

Image: Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Fountain Hills, Arizona. Flickr/Gage Skidmore