So, I needed a solution that forces a user to run the setup.exe with the admin rights.
The Visual Studio Installer Project extension creates a setup.exe that is manifested to run "asInvoker". If you want to force setup.exe to run as Administrator then you need to manually change the setup.exe manifest.
Open a Developer command prompt and navigate to the location of the setup.exe file
Extract the manifest by running the command "mt -inputresource:setup.exe;#1 -out:setup.manifest
Edit setup.manifest to change "asInvoker" to "requireAdministrator".
Update the manifest in setup.exe by running the command "mt -manifest setup.manifest -outputresource:setup.exe;#1"
Now running setup.exe should cause a consent prompt to be issued and thereafter it will run with elevated privileges as Administrator. In my quick and dirty test that is the only consent prompt that will be seen.