A successful future Republican nominee would look a lot like John Kasich

Now and likely more so in the future, the G.O.P.’s path back to the White House is likely to run through the Midwest. Now and likely more so in the future, the G.O.P. would benefit from nominating a candidate who is religious but not a Southern evangelical, who has a blue-collar background and affect, who can point to at least one major break with his party’s economic orthodoxies (in Kasich’s case, that would be his support for Ohio’s Medicaid expansion) and who generally projects an air of moderation rather than ideological zeal.

Of course not every aspect of Kasich’s persona fits this ideal profile (his sojourn at Lehman Brothers, especially). But he’s closer to the profile than Scott Walker, once (and perhaps again) the conservative movement’s Great Midwestern Hope, precisely because he has a little more distance than Walker from the official conservative movement line. And he’s far, far closer than either Trump or Ted Cruz, which is why the gap between his general-election polls and theirs isn’t just an artifact of his also-ran position.

The question, then, is whether the party could ever actually nominate a figure with this profile. Or put another way, is there a 2016 counterfactual in which John Kasich doesn’t end up as an extraordinarily persistent loser?