Say it’s Wednesday, Nov. 9, and Hillary Clinton, a very unpopular politician, has just defeated Donald Trump, a historically unpopular politician, by a safe popular-vote margin and a landslide Electoral College tally. This is by no means a foregone conclusion, but it is a distinct possibility. And say you’re the people who run the Republican Party: Republican National Committee officials, state party leaders, and so forth. You saw this coming a mile away, and you want to make sure that this—your primary electorate selecting an agonizingly unelectable candidate as your nominee in an election you should’ve won—never happens again.

What could you do?

One answer that comes to mind is to stop working your base into a destructive, nativist froth over every little thing while somehow expecting it not to reflect that insanity in its presidential primary selection. But this is exceedingly unlikely.

No, the less honest and therefore more plausible path is just to keep the insanity machine humming while tweaking the nominating rules to produce a nonhumiliating national candidate for the general election. This is a balancing act that the GOP improbably had been able to pull off until this cycle. Trump’s nomination represents the fulfillment of the disaster scenario bruited after the post-1968 primary reforms that granted voters a more direct role in selecting their nominees. The fear was that voters would be empowered to choose an incompetent and unelectable boob over the wishes of the party, and that the party would have no recourse when they did.