Now, Halperin raises a different possibility — that an independent like Sasse could win purple states like Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Colorado. But that scenario is completely fantastical. Winning purple states that Democrats have won each of the last two elections is hard. Doing it without a major-party label, and while splitting the vote with the Republican candidate, is impossible. Neither Ben Sasse, Bill Kristol, nor the reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan is going to win a three-way race against Hillary Clinton in any purple state when Donald Trump is taking conservative votes and running under the Republican banner. The third-party candidate could push any number of states to Clinton, depending on how well they perform, but they’re not going to take any states away, which is the element required to make the plan work.

It’s conceivable, though extremely unlikely, that the independent candidate could win a handful of deep-red states whose Republican voters could be persuaded to abandon the party’s official nominee and vote independent en masse. (Keep in mind, Republican elites tried to do versions of this in the primary and mostly failed.) But they’re not going to pull it off in states where their margin of error is tiny, and even losing a couple of percentage points of the vote to Trump would be fatal. Running a third-party protest candidate against Trump as a moral gesture might make sense. Doing it in hopes of stealing the election is the dumbest anti-Trump plan anybody has thought up yet.