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Subsidies will soon end. Americans will then feel the economic pain—and revolt.

The political press is preoccupied with the electoral implications of the virus crisis, and pundits insist the 2020 election will be about the Trump daily soap opera. But an emerging cultural and economic time bomb is about to explode. There has never been a wider gap between average Americans’ perception of their own economic situation and the reality of it. America could soon have its most combustible political environment in recent history.

Something that should alarm everyone: Neither the stock market nor the political preferences of those who have been hit hardest by this Covid-induced economic crisis have fundamentally changed since the crisis began. The American economy has shed more than 30 million jobs in the past eight weeks, and poll numbers haven’t moved an inch. According to Gallup, President Trump’s approval rating was 49% on Feb. 16, with 48% disapproving. Three months and the largest job loss in American history later, those numbers are exactly the same: 49% to 48%.

How is that possible? Is the political climate so partisan that the loss of your livelihood can’t change your political perspective? To some extent that could be true. But most of America is living in an illusion that masks the inevitable pain of this pandemic.

To the credit of the president and Congress, the Cares Act was passed before many Americans missed paychecks. The administration distributed the cash quickly enough that Americans had access to expanded unemployment compensation and a direct payment before their financial situation became dire. For the 40% of people making under $40,000 who have lost their jobs since March, according to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, the Cares Act ensured that their financial situation isn’t worse than it was in February. In some cases, it’s better, thanks to the $600-a-week unemployment bonus.

Much of economically vulnerable America has been insulated from economic reality. A recent Washington Post poll shows that 77% of those who lost their jobs believe they will be heading back to the same jobs following the health crisis. Pew Research reports that 68% of Americans who lost their jobs are concerned about reopening the economy too early, rather than too late.

In short, if your family hasn’t lost a loved one to Covid-19, your bank account probably looks basically the same, and you believe your job is awaiting your return, the past 10 weeks have been an extended inconvenience. Your political views are still informed by the same economic inputs that formed them in February.

That won’t hold for long. The direct payments won’t go on forever. The jobs may not come back soon. Businesses aren’t guaranteed to reopen, and the political bubble formed by this alternate reality could portend large political realignments.

The people who have lost their jobs but come to grips with a radically changed economy haven’t been silent. These are the people lining up at state capitols across the country demanding the economy reopen. So far this group has been marginalized and dismissed as kooks or reckless deniers of a deadly pandemic. But millions more may join them before the year’s end.

In many ways, this group resembles the tea party of 2009-10. That political movement started on the right but included a much larger disaffected voting bloc. The tea party voted in to Congress a class of disrupters who were more interested in breaking what they saw as a corrupt system than toeing the party line. This isn’t the same situation, but millions of Americans who aren’t ideological may drift into this sentiment as economic anxiety becomes acute. Particularly when Americans begin to feel like the trillions of federal tax dollars are being spent on someone else.

The coalition of service-industry workers who are affected by this economic downturn is larger than anything the country has experienced since the Great Depression. It would be naive to assume that the resulting political movement won’t be similar in scale.

Contributing to the illusion that America’s economy hasn’t fundamentally changed is that most urban and suburban upper-class jobs remain insulated from this employment crisis. The new-economy employee has been working from home, where his biggest complaint may be an inability to conduct a Zoom call without a dog barking or child interrupting. America’s deep geographic, social and political divides will be pulled even further apart by this economic crisis.

Historically, American elections after a crisis have been decided on the question of who can more competently lead the country to better days. Yet unlike previous challenges, the true nature of America’s economic crisis hasn’t set in on the American people. When it does, the familiar political fault lines fused with millions unemployed could make 2020 the most explosive ideological election in modern history.