I’m grateful to Alexander Bolton of The Hill for writing a piece about how Republican strategists view a hypothetical immediate future without Donald Trump. If you’re not motivated to read the article for yourself, the headline will suffice: GOP sees turnout disaster without Trump.

There’s really two parts to this analysis. The first is a look at the more cult-like aspects of Trumpism. For example, among Republican voters who have already made up their mind, about 40 percent are choosing Trump as the GOP’s 2024 presidential nominee. David Paleologos, the director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, tells Bolton “The Trump voters, even from our polling, have pretty much said: ‘It’s Trump or bust.’ There’s a percentage of voters who won’t even vote Republican if he doesn’t get the nomination.”

The second part looks at the fallout from the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision that stripped American women of their reproductive freedom and rights. Most recently, Republicans failed in a August special election in Ohio to turn out their base for an anti-abortion ballot proposition. That has the GOP analysts concerned about their prospects of beating Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) in 2024.

Given the shift of college-educated women and suburban voters to Democrats since the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, Republicans are counting on big turnout in rural areas and from the so-called “Trump coalition” to win the presidential and congressional races next year.

“With controversial issues like abortion in the suburbs, Republicans have to make up for it in rural parts of the state, and without Trump on the ballot, rural parts of the state just didn’t turn out at the same rate,” the strategist said of the election result in Ohio.

“For Republicans, the only hope is that when Trump is on the ballot in 2024 … he will turn out rural voters at a rate that overwhelms that phenomenon. It’s certainly possible,” the source said.

Overturning Roe v. Wade is a classic dog-caught-car situation. After the GOP strategists spent decades of organizing around abortion, the anti-choicers finally got what they wanted. Naturally they are in a mood to relax for a change which puts the Republican Party at risk of getting run over by the backlash. It’s now the pro-choicers who are highly motivated and so Trump’s ability to turn out rural America as a counterbalance becomes critically important.

One way of approaching this line of thinking is to consider that the Republican Party can theoretically do much better in the suburbs without Trump on the ballot. The problem is that the Dobbs decision created a more permanent suburban weakness for the GOP.

Relatedly, the Republican Party’s drift into white nationalism can be seen as a response to suburban weakness, the solution to which is to push rural white Republican support to seventy, eighty or even ninety percent. Using this logic, I predicted the GOP would move in this direction back in 2013, before I knew that Trump would be a candidate.

What Mr. [Benjy] Sarlin doesn’t broach is the subject of how conservatives might be able to grab a higher percentage of whites and how they might go about driving up white turnout. The most obvious way is to pursue an us vs. them approach that alternatively praises whites as the true, patriotic Americans, and that demonizes non-whites as a drain on the nation’s resources. This is basically the exact strategy pursued by McCain and especially Romney. It’s what Palin was all about, and it’s what [Mitt Romney’s] 47% speech was all about…

…The problem is that these attacks have already been made, and they failed in even near-optimal circumstances. Accusing the Democrats of socialism, which is a race-neutral way of accusing the party of being beholden to the racial underclasses, has been proven insufficient. The only hope for a racial-polarization strategy is to get the races to segregate their votes much more thoroughly, and that requires that more and more whites come to conclude that the Democratic Party is the party for blacks, Asians, and Latinos.

That is, indeed, how the party is perceived in the Deep South, but it would be criminal to expand those racial attitudes to the country at large.

The Republicans are coalescing around a strategy that will, by necessity, be more overtly racist than anything we’ve seen since segregation was outlawed.

This is precisely the strategy Trump used in 2015 and 2016, at it was clearly effective at producing the desired result. Yet, it appears that many of Trump’s voters are not transferrable to other candidates.

So, one problem is that Trumpism-without-Trump doesn’t look viable. Candidates who try to appeal to Trump’s white nationalist base basically forfeit the ability to make up needed ground in the suburbs without retaining Trump’s baseline rural support and turnout.

Another problem is that abortion politics have flipped post-Dobbs, meaning that the issue gives the Democrats rather than the Republicans a natural turnout advantage. Additionally, the Dobbs decision has exacerbated the Republicans’ weakness in the suburbs, so they’re more dependent than ever on rural voters.

In theory, we could design a Republican presidential candidate in a lab that would reset the parameters in a way that would make the GOP competitive. This candidate would probably be pro-choice at least on the state level. They wouldn’t appeal to white nationalism. They’d focus on traditional Republican themes that have always worked well in the suburbs, like crime, taxes, education, love of country and a strong military.

But that kind of candidate can’t win in a Republican primary.

The GOP is stuck with either Trump or Trumpism-without-Trump. Given that choice, the strategists think Trump is less disastrous.

They could be right, but Trump has a lot of legal issues to work through between now and November 2024. He could be a convicted felon by Election Day. It’s hard to believe he’s really the best the GOP can do.