Nikki Haley said many of the right things during her stop in Colorado last week, many things which needed saying, and presented an awfully good case for being the conservative alternative to former President Donald Trump as the 2024 GOP presidential nominee. This just makes the increasingly quixotic nature of her campaign all the more melancholy.

During her stop in Centennial, she offered a pretty accurate analysis of the current situation for Republicans in the state. “Now, I’m in Colorado” she said as reported in this publication, “and I’m looking at the fact that no Republican has gotten over 45% statewide since Donald Trump was president.” Just so. She went on to say, “if states like Colorado and Michigan and Minnesota want to start winning again, you have to have someone on the ballot who can win a general election.” Amen, sister. Haley has vowed to stay in the race at least through Super Tuesday, which Colorado is now a part of, and I’ve mentioned before in this space how that is a good thing. Conservatives need an option in the looming electoral desert, and Haley is objectively far and away the best candidate the Republican Party could put up against Joe Biden, by any measure. For all the bluster of the Trump faction, Haley is by far the more conservative candidate; she is far more committed to spending restraint, free trade, robust defense and foreign policy, law and order, limitations on the aggrandizement of government, institutional fealty and a host of other issues. And her commitment to conservatism, unlike Trump’s, is marked more by permanence than malleability. Haley’s conservatism is rooted in inherited wisdom informed by empirical analysis; Trump’s is subject to populist whims and, to quote William F. Buckley, “political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.”

Stay up to speed: Sign up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

But leaving all that principle aside, one is left with the hard political facts. And those facts are that, one, Joe Biden is the most beatable sitting President since Jimmy Carter, perhaps more so, and, two, about the only person who could louse such good electoral fortune up for the GOP is the presumptive nominee, Donald Trump. Polls consistently show Haley beating Biden by landslide-invoking numbers. Biden is performing poorly enough at the moment most polls have Trump beating him too, but just barely in the crucial swing districts, and in not as many of them — and by a far lesser margin — than Haley is. There seems to be an element of political risk analysis missing here.

The other big GOP-related political news of the week was the announcement by Kentucky U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell he intends to step down from Senate Republican leadership after the election. This is another blow to a Republican Party struggling to find its way; McConnell has, by any measure, been an effective leader for the Republicans in the Senate. He was an expert at the practical exercise of politics, and his masterful display of those talents ultimately led to the realignment of the federal judiciary, putting it on a trajectory toward resuming its judicial role, away from its adopted role as an alternate legislature. More recently he has served as a moral compass for the GOP, rightly denouncing Trump for his role on Jan. 6, 2021 and trying desperately to keep the GOP anchored in foreign policy sanity regarding the arming of Ukraine.

Nevertheless, at 82 it is an understandable decision. A noble one too, stepping aside to make room for the next generation — Messrs. Trump and Biden would do well to follow his example. Yet the question remains for the GOP, who will fill his shoes? Is there room anymore in the party for a prudent, traditional Goldwater-Buckley-Reagan conservative? Or has the party entirely ceded its patrimony and wasted its inheritance on the populist wing?

That’s the reason why Haley’s remaining in the fray at least through Super Tuesday — if not through the convention — is so important. Conservatism needs a home, even if it’s a foster one for the time being. Ultimately quixotic or not, Haley’s campaign is important, important enough it needs to correct a few tactical missteps — she could do better, for instance, enticing from Republican primary voters their enthusiastic support, rather than counting on them to extend it to her as a gesture of resistance to Trump.

Still, her remaining in the contest is important, not just as a matter of political hygiene, but to remind supporters of “the permanent things” that there is still potentially a home for them. If Trump had an ounce of the honor McConnell has, he would have long since stepped aside and Haley would, in November, become America’s first woman president, Margaret Thatcher with a South Carolina accent. But he didn’t, so it’s now up to the primary voters in the remaining 47 states to salvage the conservative movement.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.