In that context, he gets creamed at the polls, and it isn't close. Much as I dislike Baker, I would need to have a lot more faith in the GQP electorate than I do to believe he has any kind of chance of finding a foothold.

Maybe the GQP will be ready for sanity after another round of Trump and his MAGAts losing badly, but in that scenario they would probably just be out of serious contention for a few election cycles. Trump gave his party permission to be bigots and many of them won't jump ship just because he's lost all viability. This results in an effective split in the GQP between the power-mongers who only care about the will to power and the bigots who only care about being told it's ok to hate minorities, and those factions will have a hard time supporting the same candidates in that scenario.

Baker only has a shot right in the primary now if he skews hard Right and Trump drops out of '24. Neither of those things seem likely.