David Siders writes:

The tailgate was aimed at boosting a protégé, but it was Donald Trump whose name and image were plastered everywhere — on the banner hung from Republicans’ table outside the Arizona State University football game, on baseball caps, on signs they carried and stickers they fixed to tank-tops on a Friday night where the pavement was still hot and the temperature, at dusk, hovered around 95 degrees.

They might have turned out to support the protégé, Kari Lake, but it was his movement — Trump’s — that the tailgaters were starting to worry about.

What would become of MAGA when Trump — either in four years if he wins the presidency again or sooner if he loses — is gone? Could someone else replace him?

“I’ve often wondered that,” said Terri Seiber, who sat beside me on the curb in front of two porta potties, a Trump-Vance yard sign in the dark beside her. “We don’t have anybody in the Republican Party who’s even close.”

Not Lake, she said. “No, I don’t think so.” Seiber had seen her collapse in the gubernatorial race two years ago and knew she was running behind her Democratic opponent in the Senate contest, now, too.

Not JD Vance, Trump’s running mate. “No. He sounds like a real great guy. But Trump, he’s just got that oomph about him.”

Who else?

“It does make me worry,” she told me. “The movement is mostly him.”

I’d come to Arizona to ask not about the presidential contest that culminates Tuesday but about what will happen after that, about the post-Trump future of MAGA. If Republicans anywhere have an answer, it should be here. For all its history of electing iconoclasts — politicians like Barry Goldwater and John McCain, but also Kyrsten Sinema and Jeff Flake — Arizona has also seen them run their course.

In the MAGA era, there are few states where Republicans have remade themselves so completely in service to the cause. Arizona was the site, not far from Lake’s tailgate, of the farcical “audit” of the 2020 election and provided a border-state backdrop for Trump’s nativist, anti-migrant rhetoric. Republicans elevated hard-liners at every level in their primaries and paid an uncommonly high price, losing both Senate seats and, in 2020, flipping Democratic in a presidential race for the first time since 1996. In the midterms two years later, Lake lost the gubernatorial race, as did Republicans running for U.S. Senate, state attorney general and secretary of state.

Along the way, the state GOP, in going full fringe, produced one of the most vivid demonstrations anywhere of the singularity of Trump’s appeal. While the former president is leading Vice President Kamala Harris here narrowly in recent polls, Lake, once one of the MAGA movement’s most promising rising stars, has been all but written off, running about 4 percentage points behind Rep. Ruben Gallego, the Democratic nominee.

Acknowledging things for Lake were “getting kind of grim,” Alex Stansberry, the vice president of the College Republicans at ASU, put the problem succinctly: “The only person who’s been able to win on the MAGA platform is Trump.” [Continue reading…]