For the past fifteen or so years, the dynamics of our political discourse have been fundamentally changing. I mean, you could argue that discourse has been getting worse since the days of George W. Bush, but it’s been since the rise of Barack Obama and the cults of personality in politics that things have gotten particularly awful. The rise of Trump took it to new extremes.

You have former Republicans like Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes, along with all the Lincoln Project folks, who are former establishment types that aren’t so much Republican as they are values mercenaries. They are warriors of a forgotten era, now reduced to selling their perspectives to whatever side will pay them in money or clout. They have left the big tent of the Republican Party, vowing never to return again.

At the same time, you have a not-insignificant number of people who voted Republican because of Trump and have since decided that their guy was screwed out of re-election so they just won’t vote anymore. They, too, have left. The tent is not so big anymore, and I don’t think it will be again.

But while you have these departures you all have a number of people who are giving the Republican Party a second look. You have black and Hispanic voters – not many, but enough to be a noticeable data point – that aren’t happy with where wealthy white progressives are taking the party. You also have some people who aren’t conservative or Republican but are finding themselves more on their side than they were before.

Consider guys like Bill Maher, Dave Chapelle, and Joe Rogan. They are not Republicans. They probably will never vote for Republicans. But, they look at what the cultural progressives, fueled by their political leaders, are doing to free speech and the comedy industry and they are horrified.

Consider writers like Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, and others who have very notably been not just of the left but very anti-Republican. They are now openly critical of their own side in a way they weren’t before. They, like the comedians, see how the cultural shift has affected the American left and how incoherent the movement has become.

You can’t and shouldn’t expect that any of those folks would come over to vote for Republicans and conservatives anytime soon. But they also represent a lot of people more toward the middle who, if they don’t vote Republican, might be inspired to stay home and not vote for their usual Democrats. There are signs of it in the polling already, and the Democrats are panicking.

The era of big tent politics is over. Rather, you have a bunch of smaller tents camped out on the same side of a battlefield, and the battles are all cultural. That is not a battlefield Democrats have had to be as competitive on before, but their ultra-progressive politicians and vocal minority in the base have shifted the battleground a bit. Now, they have to be defensive because they have pushed too far on control of education, silencing speech they don’t like, and other issues.

It is not the GOP’s strongest ground, either. But if they can manage to not alienate the people who are giving them a second look, then they have a chance to reclaim some of the high ground in cultural fights.