THE TRUMP BRAND:

In Washington, the lesson many Republican political professionals expected their party to draw from a less-than-red-wave midterm was that the most hard-right politics of the Trump era were weighing them down - that general election voters were tiring of election denialism and, if not Donald Trump himself, his grievances about the 2020 election. Many high-profile candidates the former president rammed through the primaries last year lost in November, and in Arizona, the wreckage was particularly severe.

Kari Lake, a former TV anchor and one of the GOP's most prominent election deniers, had become such an electrifying candidate that she was compelled to tamp down speculation about a vice presidential run. But then she lost. So did the hard-liners running for U.S. Senate, state attorney general and secretary of state. For too many independents and moderate Republican voters, they were a turn-off.

Arizona was a "perfect political science experiment" for the GOP nationally, Stan Barnes, a former state lawmaker and Republican consultant in Arizona, told me.

"We had the best candidate in anyone's lifetime in Kari Lake, and she had the Republican wind at her back," he said. "Yet, Kari lost. And I think the post-mortem is, you can't stand on, 'The whole system's corrupt' and 'Elections are stolen' as a platform for why people should vote for you."

He said, "No matter what you or I think of the reality of it, if you want to win the election and you want to change things, it's not the way to win."

Yet denialism and its attendant conspiracies animate a large swath of the Republican Party -- still. And if Arizona is any example, it suggests that a not insignificant percentage of the national electorate is determined to run the same doomed experiment again in 2024.

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