Smart conservatives have been saying for years that it’s time to move on from Ronald Reagan. First Things published a symposium after Donald Trump’s election inveighing against the “dead consensus” of “warmed over Reaganism.” Younger conservatives frequently refer to “Zombie Reaganism” possessing the body of the Republican Party. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah warned in a 2013 speech at the Heritage Foundation that the country would soon be as far removed from Reagan’s election as D-Day. That date came five years ago.

And yet ambitious Republicans are making the opposite bet ahead of next year’s midterm elections: that the Reagan playbook still makes considerable sense because Democrats are pursuing policies that will recreate the conditions that led to his improbable landslide election in 1980. Crime, inflation, high gas prices, humiliation, and evacuation in the Middle East — campaigning against President Biden sounds eerily similar to running against Jimmy Carter.

What if there was a conservative realignment and no one came?