What Republicans need "is a protest candidacy: a way for anti-Trump Republicans to register their opposition to the president and their support for the values that underlie that opposition," says columnist Ramesh Ponnuru,. "The campaign’s backers would of course want their candidate to become president if (several bolts of) lightning should strike. But a merely respectable showing would demonstrate the continuing relevance of a non-Trumpist conservatism and could help to set the direction of the party after Trump — especially if he either loses in November 2020 or has a second term that Republicans come to see as a failure."