To Micah’s earlier post — this is some serious putting the cart before the horse by Douthat. Besides, you know, besting Trump in a primary, it’s never been easy to run as a sitting governor of Virginia because usually governors run after they’ve been in office for at least a term. But governors can’t run for reelection in Virginia, so generally you either run after you’ve only been in office for a couple years, like Doug Wilder for a minute in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary (which was a huge failure) or you try to run afterward like Jim Gilmore in the GOP presidential primary in 2016 (Gilmore’s was not a serious campaign, to be fair).
