Because Trump represents such a sharp a break from the GOP establishment mold (not to mention conventions regarding what we expect from politicians more broadly) it’ll be interesting to see how his candidacy impacts the broader form of the GOP coalition in the long run. Even if his antics end up creating a net outflow of party support (as seems likely), it’s hard to imagine the post-Trump GOP blueprint won’t have some substantive contrasts with that of 2012, say.

To be clear, I’m not a fan of Trump as a candidate (apart from entertainment value, maybe). But it’s remarkable that the GOP nominee is calling out the influence of big money over politicians (speaking as big money, no less), talking about electoral fraud (remember Bush v. Gore?), knocking the interventionist foreign policy paradigm that became the hallmark of the previous Republican president, and in one debate effectively calling for socialized healthcare (if not in so many words, and in contrast to the plan he ultimately released).

So while I absolutely agree that Trump’s heavy reliance on nativism and white identity politics doesn’t bode well for the GOP coalition in the near future, these rhetorical-ideological developments seem significant, right? The mini-Overton window of GOP discourse is expanding. The changes are overshadowed by the current nominee’s larger-than-life personality and reality TV antics — not to mention the increasingly carnivalesque atmosphere permeating this electoral cycle — but the door is open: the GOP nominee is going to attack the Democratic nominee for being in bed with corporations, beholden to the wealthy, for being a warmonger, for supporting overtly racist criminal justice policies.

If the party can manage to peel these discursive changes away from from the white-identity-politics packaging they’re currently draped in, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re able to leverage some of these newly-acceptable stances into a more diverse coalition next time around.