“This is the moment the Trump fever breaks” is a staple of a certain niche of MAGA-skeptical conservative commentary. The earliest inspiration for it was probably Trump goofing on John McCain in the summer of 2015 for, of all things, being taken prisoner by the Viet Cong. Surely the pro-military right wouldn’t tolerate the indecency of a louche New York playboy mocking a POW for the ordeal he suffered in the Hanoi Hilton.

Every “this is the moment” take since then, including the aftermath of January 6, has been a hollow exercise in wishful thinking that the GOP is still more of a policy coalition than a personality cult.

But as tedious of this genre of punditry is, I’ll concede that Glenn Youngkin’s amazing win in Virginia on Tuesday night is a glimmer of hope. Not a ray of hope. Not a twinkling. Just a glimmer for the reason Rich Lowry states here. It’s an unusually visible example of a Republican winning a race populists were focused on keenly with a persona that scans much more establishment than populist. Not anti-populist, of course; Youngkin was quite MAGA-friendly, of necessity. But size him up and ask yourself if you’re more likely to see him in the front row at a Trump rally or having dinner with Mitt Romney. Plain as day, right?

And yet that guy shot the lights out in a Biden +10 state two nights ago. If a Glenn Youngkin can do that, asks Lowry, does the GOP really need a Donald Trump?

There is no doubt that Trump brought a new combativeness to the GOP, sensed a hunger among the party’s voters for new departures on immigration and trade, and won the presidency in 2016 based on an electoral map few thought possible. But Trump has lived off the legend of 2016 — only he knows how to win or fight, and he holds the key a working-class-based electoral coalition that no one else understands as instinctively or as well.

Trump’s image as the wizard of winning was always doubtful. In 2016, some Republican Senate candidates notably outperformed him in their states. In 2020, Republican House candidates also outperformed Trump, not by enormous margins, but enough to make a difference. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution points out, if Trump had gotten the same number of votes in Georgia as Republican House candidates, he would have won the state by 16,000 voters, rather than losing it by 12,000, thus saving Sidney Powell the trouble of coming up with elaborate fantasies for why he lost and making the lives of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger much easier.

I’ve never thought Trump’s “stop the steal” schtick was about anything grander than soothing his own bruised ego after a defeat. But it does have an immense strategic benefit to him in helping to keep MAGA voters convinced that he’s no liability in terms of electability, never mind that his favorable rating has always been garbage and he lost the popular vote to two different lackluster Democrats. The moment the thought begins to occur to Trump voters that they might be more likely to own the libs at the ballot box by nominating someone else is the moment that Trump’s grip on the party begins to weaken. His election lies help keep that thought out of mind. He didn’t lose the popular vote in 2016; Democrats simply got millions of illegals to vote somehow. And he didn’t lose it last year; Democrats rigged the voting machines or threw out ballots or yadda yadda.

Erick Erickson drew a hard lesson for his radio listeners after Youngkin’s upset on Tuesday night. If Democrats can’t rig the election in a Biden +10 state which their party controls, they couldn’t rig it last year in a reddish state controlled by Republicans like Georgia:

A message from management. pic.twitter.com/VDf44irH89

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) November 3, 2021

Very much related:

This. Republicans saw Saddam Hussein level numbers from the rural areas of VA. Could that be partly due to VA laws making it easier to vote? And the Republican candidate encouraging the use of all the voting access tools? Probably! https://t.co/DR4j5967fc

— Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25) November 4, 2021

Maybe Trump lost because … he’s unlikable to most of the country and they’d rather elect underwhelming Democrats than elect him? Even the chief beneficiary of having him on the ballot last year seems to think so:

Reporter: You won the state by 10 points
Biden: I know we did but I was running against Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/WUYWN0g6wc

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 3, 2021

A Times reporter noted yesterday that Youngkin’s win shouldn’t seem that surprising. Republicans killed it downballot last November, after all. They didn’t lose a single GOP-held House seat and probably would control the Senate right now if not for Trump’s “rigged election” idiocy in Georgia. Anti-Trump voters tend not to hold their disdain for you-know-who against rank-and-file Republicans, which Terry McAuliffe and his party have just rediscovered in the most painful way. What if the party is actually better off without Trump as its representative?

What if negative partisanship is now so intense on the right, especially with a Democrat in the White House, that Republican voters are willing to turn out en masse to own the libs no matter who’s at the top of the ballot? If you missed this post earlier, read it now for a reminder that hedge-fund guy Glenn Youngkin ran up the score in rural Trumpy areas higher than even Trump himself did last fall.

What if Trump has now essentially served his purpose within the party? He galvanized white working-class voters with a culture-war agenda after they’d been overlooked for years by the post-Reagan GOP. But he also alienated suburban voters in droves, enough to tip the election last fall to Joe Biden. Youngkin’s campaign was an experiment in whether those working-class whites would stay motivated for a more establishment candidate even as he lurched towards the center to try to win suburban voters back. We now have our answer.

If you can get the suburban voters by nominating a MAGA-friendly Not Trump while still holding onto the MAGA voters, why would you nominate Trump instead? Is the point to win elections or to reassure Trump that he’s the King of the GOP?

Philip Klein wrote a piece today citing Youngkin’s win as a reason why a “credible conservative” should primary Trump in 2024. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t name anyone he has in mind:

If there is any chance to deny Trump the nomination, a credible conservative needs to be willing to challenge him. Anybody who tries to run the typical anti-Republican strategy along the lines of Jon Huntsman or John Kasich won’t win anything beyond a stack of glowing magazine profiles.

Such challenges would be a gift to Trump, because it would reinforce the false binary that you’re either with Trump or with the RINO wing of the party.

Instead, there needs to be an actual conservative, or several, willing to challenge Trump. This person needs to have unimpeachable credentials on the issues and should spend the campaign discussing those issues instead of jumping at every chance to hop on CNN and denounce the Trump outrage du jour. This person wouldn’t run as an anti-Trump candidate but would be willing to argue that the Republican Party needs to move on from 2020, focus on Biden’s failures, and lay out a vision for how to fight the Left and land actual conservative policy wins.

Fortune favors the bold, Klein notes, pointing to Bill Clinton running in 1992 despite expectations that Mario Cuomo would dominate the primaries and Obama daring to take on the Clinton machine in 2008. But those examples don’t work. Clinton and Obama could run knowing that if they won the primaries the party would demand that their vanquished rivals unite behind them in the general election. No one who ran and beat Trump in a GOP primary would have that assurance. Trump doesn’t care about the party, he cares about Trump. If he got beat, he’d scream “rigged election!” to protect his image of invincibility and end up convincing a meaningful number of his voters to stay home. There’s no point primarying him if you expect to lose the general election anyway due to sabotage.

Furthermore, Clinton and Obama didn’t have to contend with a huge swath of primary who shape their political ideology in terms of loyalty to a single man. What would it mean to a MAGA voter for someone to be “credibly conservative” while also running against Trump and his record? What would that candidate look like? Tim Scott is credibly conservative but would the base continue to see him that way if he was attacking Trump’s trade policy on the trail every day, for instance? Liz Cheney famously has a far more conservative voting record than Elise Stefanik yet Stefanik replaced her in the leadership as the more “conservative” choice simply because Cheney is ardently anti-Trump. To much of the GOP, there’s no such thing as an anti-Trump “conservative.”

Even if a challenger saw a lane in a primary against him, that challenger would know that victory is a long longshot and that failure would almost certainly mean the end of his career given how vindictive MAGA-world is. Could Ron DeSantis beat Trump? If he wins his reelection bid in a blowout next year, indicating strong electability nationwide, I think he’ll ruminate about it. But if he jumps in and Trump starts attacking him and he ends up coming up short, his populist cred will never be the same. That’s a big gamble for a man in his early 40s to take. Why not stand aside for the king and run in 2028 instead?

I’ll leave you with this audio of Trump, not sounding insecure at all, looking to take credit for Youngkin’s win and muttering that his own 10-point loss in Virginia must have been due to — what else? — cheating.

This morning, Trump took credit for the win in VA, pushed back on the idea that Youngkin is more popular than him, and claimed that he won the state in 2020. pic.twitter.com/J9Ky0vgcWp

— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) November 3, 2021