As the inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump approaches, the best way to assess the incoming administration may be to focus on the ultimate factors that led to his victory. Trump was not elected in a vacuum, and, as his agenda takes shape, we can start to gauge its impact on the political economy whence his candidacy emerged.

Trump won by challenging the credibility of both the political and academic establishments, relentlessly highlighting discrepancies between their depiction of the U.S. political economy and the reality that many voters experienced. Like Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party primary, he started drawing large crowds by breaking ranks with his party's mainstream. While Hillary Clinton and Republican rivals such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio tried to build coalitions based on cultural issues and partisan traditions, Trump and Sanders set their sights squarely on what mattered most to voters: a political economy in which elected officials strongly promoted a broad-based prosperity that included them.

How did the other candidates miss this central theme? My sense is that they didn't; rather, their efforts to attract a broad spectrum of voters were constrained by a system that makes it extremely difficult to fund a credible political campaign without catering slavishly to the wealthiest sliver of American society. That system invited rebellion, and Trump and Sanders — by self-financing and grass-roots fundraising, respectively — were ideally positioned to lead one.