PRESCOTT, ARIZONA—“The fight is not over tomorrow. They want to take it,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said Monday evening on the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse. “They want to prevent Donald Trump from sitting if he wins.”

“Let us live, live and live, and if we must die, we will die fighting for good,” he added.

“If we must die” is a strange sentiment to express at a campaign event – ​​a little more Yukio Mishima than Karl Rove. But this casual apocalypticism has become a recurring theme in Republican politics. Modern Republican Party leaders are preoccupied with death and violence. This is a priority email that comes from the top of the ticket.

Biggs, former chairman of the Freedom Caucus and regular instigator of chaos on Capitol Hill, was very outspoken during his speech at Kari Lake’s final campaign event Monday night. In fact, all the speakers were, including Lake. Biggs and his colleagues will scheme to undermine the election results if the Republicans do not come out on top. They did it in the wake of the 2020 election, and they will happily do it again. After all, that’s what the boss asks.

In their speeches, Biggs, his colleague Eli Crane and Abe Hamedeh, a House candidate who sought to overturn his own failed election for attorney general in 2022 – provided a glimpse of the weeks and, perhaps, months to come.

“They tried to eliminate me, but they haven’t caught me yet,” Crane said, pointing to camera crews and reporters. “They’re pushing these candidates, they’re pushing this ticket. It’s very totalitarian, and you know it, don’t you.

“We all know what happened in the last elections in 2022,” Hamedeh said. “We all know what happened in 2020, and yet here we are, standing in front of the Yavapai County Courthouse, saying we will restore law and order, we will restore the Constitution. We will restore the America they stole from us.

As the various speakers delivered their similar speeches attesting to the greatness of Trump, the evil of the media and the injustice of the election, participants sneered and heckled the reporters. In that way, it was a very typical MAGA rally. At this point the model looks quite worn.

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These Republican candidates and legislators’ belief in a rigged system is a byproduct of their voting base, which leans far to the right and consumes information from a variety of questionable and unreliable sources, including Trump himself.

It’s hard to put it any other way: the participants I spoke with believe things that contradict reality. The biggest one I kept hearing was the phrase that Trump will win, and win big. If he doesn’t, several of them said, the result is the product of cheating and should be thrown out. They don’t just want their candidate to win: they are unable to accept a different outcome epistemologically, just as Ptolemy could not accept a cosmos in which the earth revolves around the sun.

I spoke with Debbi Avila, a woman holding two flags: one, a standard Old Glory flag, and the other, a black “TRUMP NATION” flag. (When I approached her, she was fumbling over that last banner because her friend, the other flag bearer, was late.) Avila has no worries about the election results. She thinks this will be the blowout to end all blowouts.

“Trump is leading in every state,” Avila said. “I mean, legitimate polls show it. I don’t think there’s any competition. That doesn’t worry me.

Leslie Beuter, a woman wearing a red “KARI WON” hat, assured me it was no joke. She sincerely believes that Lake did not lose his bid for governor in 2022. (Incidentally, she doesn’t believe that Trump lost in 2020, either.) However, Beuter said something that surprised me : She said it would be irresponsible for Trump to declare victory before all the votes have been counted.

“He should wait until after the match,” she said. “But if there is evidence of foul play, then this needs to be resolved.”

Beuter lacks not so much confidence in the election as undying faith in Donald Trump. Sounding much more optimistic than the Republican politicians who all spoke in somber tones during the rally, Avila put it this way:

I’m really not concerned about this election at all. I think anyone who looks at the facts finds that this is a clear decision. What he did in four years was incredible. He kept us out of the war. We had an incredible economy. And if we look at Kamala’s track record, come on. It’s, yes, it’s quite easy to make a good decision. I think people will do it when they go to the polls, or when they vote, and wherever they are. I’m doing well. Not a worry in the world.

It’s worth noting that in this deep red corner of the state, there were no swing or norm Republican voters in sight. Lake had chosen to make his final campaign speech in Yavapai County, which Trump won by almost 30 points in 2020. It’s a curious choice, one that could indicate that Lake is relying more on the Republican base to support his Senate bid than any other demographic shift.

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The atmosphere has always been different with the Democrats. At every event I’ve been to, they’ve been either cautiously optimistic or stressed to the point of shaking like a chihuahua on the 4th of July.

Still, many Democratic voters would be happy to find an excuse to tolerate, or perhaps even vote for, a Republican. This is Arizona, after all. But the current circumstances do not give them many opportunities in this regard.

Ricardo Reyes, a Marine veteran I met in Phoenix who runs Arizona operations for Common Defensean organization that lobbies on behalf of veterans, told me that the kind of rhetoric Arizonans hear from Lake and other right-wing populists alienates voters from the Republican Party and helps give the Arizona a deeper purple shade.

“We should align ourselves more with the Republican Party — at least on the things they say they align with,” Reyes said. He added that politicians like Trump, Lake and the others “represent everything we don’t like about the Republican Party.”

“You know, family values, religion, hard work, all of those are things that go hand in hand with the Latino community,” he said. “But because every year they want to use us as scapegoats, they push us harder and further to the left.”

I saw the same thing in rural Pennsylvania. Voters who appear to be average central-cast Republican voters are detaching themselves from the party because their candidates lack integrity or cling to issues completely unrelated to their constituents’ interests.

If there are enough of these R-to-D voters to swing the election in Harris’ favor tonight, well, I actually know it, but I’m not going to say it yet. (Just kidding. We’ll all know soon enough.)