re: Where’s all the staunch conservative candidates?

Because there are divides within American Conservatism that make being an across the board staunch conservative as a politician basically impossible. Ie there are American conservatives whose identity is built around a completely free market, there are American conservatives whose identity are primarily concerned with individual liberty, and there are American conservatives who want to live in a country where everyone subscribes to conservative Christian lifestyles. All of those things can work as a broad alliance, but there are deep disagreements that come to the forefront when having to advance actual policy goals. MAGA has the advantage over a staunch conservative because it has a distinct worldview that it advances which is national populism, the idea that the state should work at the behest of rural Americans. Now that’s not going to get the Chicago school free market types because they like being able to move money around freely and tend to live in suburbs, and it’s not going to appeal to individual liberty purists who don’t like having soldiers in the street or strict rules about how you have to present yourself in public. Now those groups will still generally vote MAGA because every compromise they have to make for the Trump administration is offset by a trade they would have made with a Democrat administration. The free market guys might not like tariffs, but they would have been paying taxes on their capital gains. The individual liberty guys might bristle at soldiers or ice on the street, but they also know that they aren’t coming for them and now betting is legal throughout the country. What I’m saying is any subset of conservative groups can do well just by being honest about what it seeks to accomplish. At worse you end up losing a few voters at the margin in exchange for enthusiastic support from the folks who are with you.