Once the November midterms are in the books, all eyes will move to the 2024 election cycle. On the Republican side, there’s plenty of speculation about who will become the standard-bearer. Will it once again be Donald Trump? Will Ron DeSantis ride his wave of popularity to new heights?

Or will it be…Will Hurd? Wait, what?

I’m not just making that up. According to a lengthy profile in The Atlantic, Hurd sees himself as a sort of conservative savior (though, he wouldn’t use that phrase) with an already built-in majority constituency.

"The overwhelming majority of conservative people in this country…are not watching Fox News every night or imbibing conspiracy theories online. 'But now they’re getting fed up. They are tired of everybody. They are ready for something different.'”https://t.co/EyNFpsz4LR

— Will Hurd (@WillHurd) March 28, 2022

Last spring, having just retired from Congress, Will Hurd was feeling adrift. He had agreed to write a book, telling his remarkable life story and diagnosing a malfunctioning political system, all while teasing out a run for the presidency in 2024, but Hurd struggled with an underlying anxiety. For the first time in his adult life, the guy who’d climbed so quickly—from college class president to star CIA operative to lone Black Republican in the House—didn’t know his next move…

…“Some of my friends, some of my former colleagues, they are desperate,” Hurd tells me. “They are so desperate to hold on to their positions, to hold on to their power, that they make really bad decisions.”

Those bad decisions are evident when it comes to big, history-forming events, such as the party’s enabling of Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy. But the bad decisions are also made subtly, in response to smaller episodes every single day, often to accommodate the party’s ugliest impulses. (The third chapter of Hurd’s book, written as an open letter to the Republican Party, is titled “Don’t Be an Asshole, Racist, Misogynist, or Homophobe.”)

If you don’t know who Hurd is, you aren’t alone. He’s a relatively obscure former congressman outside of beltway circles, having retired at the age of 42 prior to the 2020 election. His GOP replacement in Texas went on to outperform his electoral margins despite the cycle not being a kind one to Republicans. Hurd is also your typical establishment figure who believes he truly stands tall against the excesses of the party’s base, whatever those may be in his mind.

He’s also delusional.

Let’s start with who he ran to in order to share his story. Tim Alberta is a former writer for National Review who moved on to greener (and more liberal) pastures the moment the opportunity arose. If he was ever actually a conservative, he’s staunchly on the left at this point. If Hurd wants to reach the great unwashed masses on the right who aren’t watching Fox News every night, he couldn’t have picked a worse conduit than Alberta and the far-left dumpster fire that is The Atlantic. That decision alone is enough for me to make a sound judgment that he simply doesn’t have what it takes to compete in 2024.

Then there’s his background. As a former CIA operative, Hurd finds himself an alumnus of an agency that essentially no one on the right trusts, and for very good reason. Anyone running in 2024 will need to have anti-establishment credibility, and Hurd, from his pre-politics employment to his Paul Ryan alliance once in office, simply doesn’t fit that bill. He is everything most Republicans are looking to avoid.

The idea that Republicans who watch Fox News aren’t “normal” is also a miscalculation on Hurd’s part. Yes, most people are fairly disconnected from politics prior to the month or so before a major election. In that sense, he’s correct there are a lot of currently unengaged voters out there on the right. Yet, that does not mean they think fundamentally differently than the Republicans who do watch Tucker Carlson every night. This idea that there’s a majority sitting out there ready to jump on board a Hurd candidacy strikes me as lunacy.

Alberta has already responded to that criticism.

That's right: the savants who never saw Obama coming, who gave Trump no shot, who used Ron Paul & Bernie Sanders & Andrew Yang as punch lines, who missed Brexit & Macron & AMLO, who thought Zelensky was just a pretty face… know for sure who can and can't catch fire in 2024. https://t.co/d08EUPKde7

— Tim Alberta (@TimAlberta) March 28, 2022

So the argument appears to be that because some past figures, many with high name-ID prior to their rise, managed to catch fire, Hurd has the same shot. That’s just silly, and to add context to Alberta’s snark, only Trump and Obama became the President of the United States out of his list. Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Andrew Yang did end up as punchlines, and lots of people on the right saw Brexit coming. The insertion of Volodymyr Zelensky doesn’t even make sense, but I’m not sure it’s supposed to because Alberta is just listing random people by the time his post ends.

I don’t claim to know exactly what will happen in 2024. What I do know is that the nominee will not be someone who represents a turning back of the clock. Obviously, Trump will be hard to beat, but if he is to be beat (or he ultimately decides against running despite his current flirtation), it will be at the hands of someone like DeSantis who has been in the trenches the last four years. More importantly, it will be someone who has shown an ability to fight, not just on tax policy, but on a cultural level. Hurd has shown zero ability to do that and running to Tim Alberta to fluff his possible candidacy is a really bad start.