Amash is no neophyte, and more importantly, he’s no washed-up also-ran clinging to relevance. At age 40, he’s just a decade into a congressional career and clearly anticipates a longer political one. He wouldn’t throw away his professional capital to become nothing more than a protest vote and a punchline of a joke about Orange Man Bad.

I believe that Amash is seeing Biden’s rapid deterioration alongside the Republican Party’s embrace of massive deficit spending. The longer Biden spends hunkering down in a Wilmington basement as his sexual assault accuser Tara Reade gains contemporaneously corroborating evidence, the more it looks like he has something to hide. And the further Trump transforms the party of fiscal responsibility and federalism into the petty party of crying at journos and lauding multitrillion dollar federal jobs packages, the more obvious the case for Amash’s candidacy becomes.

Whichever of the two parties you’re in, your betters have paved the road for a moral and honest third-party candidate to peel off your voters, and Amash was just the one smart and worthy enough to take it.