In his CPAC speech and subsequent ones, Walker likened his clash with Wisconsin’s public-sector unions to Ronald Reagan’s 1981 firing of 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, thus presenting himself as a rightful heir of the party’s patron saint. He extended that connection to foreign policy. A few days after his CPAC speech, Walker told a Palm Beach Club for Growth audience that Reagan’s firing of the controllers was “the most significant foreign policy decision of my lifetime” because “it sent a message around the world [that] we weren’t to be messed with.” Walker’s similar toughness under fire with the unions, in other words, makes him ready to be commander in chief. “If I can take on 100,000 protesters,” he told the crowd at CPAC, “I can do the same across the world.” The mainstream press treated such comparisons as bumbling efforts to cover the fact that, as a governor and former county executive, he has scant foreign policy experience. But conservative audiences loved the show of resolution. Walker wants tough strength to be his calling card; his campaign book is called, not coincidentally, Unintimidated.

What GOP primary voters most want is a candidate who will not compromise on conservative principles but can still win a general election. That’s where Walker’s triumph over public-sector unions really helps him. He not only stood up to big labor, he points out, but politically lived to tell the tale, winning a recall election in 2012 and reelection to a second term in 2014. “We did it without compromising,” he told CPAC:

We took on the powerful special interests in Washington and we returned the power back to the hand of the hardworking taxpayers. They didn’t like that. They tried to recall me. They made me their number-one target. But in the end we showed them we can fight and win for the hardworking taxpayer.

It’s obviously too early to know who will ultimately become the GOP nominee. The field of candidates is crowded. The debates are months away, and Walker has real vulnerabilities. His flip-flops on key issues like immigration have already hurt him among some conservatives. His poll ratings in his home state have fallen and his national poll numbers weakened in the late spring. His claim to special status as a conservative who can win in a blue state is also questionable. Two of his three statewide electoral victories occurred during off-year elections (2010 and 2014), when GOP voters typically predominate, and his 2012 recall victory was colored by the fact that voters were being asked to overturn the previous year’s election results over a policy dispute, which, according to exit polls, many of them thought was inherently unjust.

But let’s presume he does become the nominee. Walker’s triumph over the unions could continue to be a useful tool for him, not only in firing up the GOP base but also in reaching out to independents, 47 percent of whom take a dim view of unions, according to the same Pew poll, and even to persuadable Democrats. The 2016 elections will be a battle over the role of government in failing to spur a too-weak economy and boost stagnant incomes. The Democratic nominee will likely present herself (or, less likely, himself) as a champion of the middle class who will wrest control of government away from the big banks and other powerful corporate interests and use it to benefit average Americans. Walker will be armed with an equivalent reform narrative. The problem with government, he can say, is not just that it is too big, holds back private-sector growth, and robs us of our freedoms—the standard Republican view, which he tirelessly proclaims—but that it has been captured by its own employees, who run it for their own benefit, not the public’s. Just as he took on the unions in Wisconsin, he can say, so will he take on the bureaucrats in Washington, returning power back to “the hardworking taxpayers.”