Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

Supporters cheer as Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event in Moon Township, Pa., on Nov. 6. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Over the weekend I found myself in an interesting exchange with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough over Donald Trump’s closing ad in this presidential campaign. Here’s the ad:

Now, to me, the ad is disturbing because Trump’s words are largely lifted from one of Trump’s crazier speeches of this cycle, one that BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray characterized as “full Breitbart.” Over the weekend Josh Marshall noted that the ad was “packed with anti-Semitic dog whistles, anti-Semitic tropes and anti-Semitic vocabulary.” Others aren’t seeing it (without denying that it might be there). I think it’s fair to say that reasonable people can disagree about what they see in the ad.

Scarborough, on the other hand, loved it:

In my back-and-forth with Scarborough on this, what clearly intrigued him about the ad was the possibility that one could articulate a message of economic populism without the bigotry and casual racism that Trump has epitomized from the first day of his campaign.

Scarborough may well be correct — he’s been elected to something and I haven’t. It is certainly true that a LOT of election post-mortems will likely revolve around this very question. But let me suggest three big problems with the notion of a GOP platform of economic populism.

The first is whether it is politically possible for the Republican Party to embrace economic populism without Trump’s nastier strain of cultural populism. Given the shifting demographics of the party — accelerated by Trump — I don’t think it’s possible. Sen. Bernie Sanders was able to pull this off because he had a nonracist socialist ideology to use as his intellectual support. Any conservative variant of economic populism means a heavy dose of nationalism. It will be hard to keep that from bleeding over into a more virulent strain of ethnic nationalism. By definition, populism tends to bash elites, and low-information voters will respond better when the elites are cast as some villainous “other.”

Second, to repeat a theme, I’m completely unconvinced that a message of economic populism is actually all that popular. One can certainly point to the primaries of both parties as a counterexample. But the polling on this is quite clear: “Republicans, particularly Trump supporters, have mostly shifted in a more economically populist direction. The rest of the country, however, has shifted in the opposite direction. This might just be a function of raw partisanship, although the movement of independents suggests not.”

If you think I’m wrong, ask yourself the following questions: (a) can the GOP win national elections without attracting support from Asians and college-educated voters; (b) do you think those voters will be super-keen on a message of economic populism?

Third, and most important, the American economic system is not spinning out of control against workers. Over the past 18 months, the American economy has done pretty well for its workers, as the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson notes:

Since June 2015, the economy has created more than 3.2 million jobs — more than the number of jobs in 38 separate states and roughly equal to the number of workers in states like Massachusetts or Washington. In the last 15 months, the labor force has added another Bay State . ..

Average hourly earnings are now rising at their fastest rate since Obama’s first year in office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Median wage growth for full-time workers is at its highest level since the recession, according to the Atlanta Federal Reserve.

For years into the recovery, only the rich were getting richer. But now, according to separate Census analyses by White House economists and Bank of America economists, the fastest wage growth is actually taking place among the poorest households.

Combine this with rising levels of real income and health-care coverage and you have an economy that finally seems to be working for the poor and the middle class. This is not a moment when economic populism — and the policy disasters that usually come with it — seems like a very good idea.

Even during boom times, economic populism will play to parts of the country that feel left behind. Focusing on those who are worse off is the one feature of populism that holds some broad-based appeal. But I would suggest that Scarborough’s desire to graft a message of economic populism onto a conservative party is based on some faulty premises.

Maybe, just maybe, the system is not as rigged as Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders thinks it is.