New reporting published Wednesday revealed deepening anxiety among MAGA insiders, who privately fear that President Donald Trump’s go-to campaign strategy “doesn’t work anymore.” According to Michael Warren, politics editor at the conservative outlet The Dispatch, the plummeting impact and attendance at Trump’s rallies signal “MAGA’s last gasp.”

With pollsters forecasting a potential blue tsunami, Warren writes that “Trump is doing what he can, in the only way he knows how, to salvage his party’s hopes: holding primetime fly-in rallies that are focused on his favorite subject, himself.” The stakes of that bet are structural as much as partisan: midterm elections determine control of Congress and, with it, the legislative environment for the remainder of a president’s term. Yet while Trump has been relentless in his campaign schedule, “it’s far from clear that Trump barnstorming the country to stump for candidates will even help.” As one veteran GOP operative put it bluntly: “We’re f——. I don’t think rallies work anymore.”

For Warren, that raises a pressing question: “What good is showing up to do these rallies anymore, and at the eleventh hour?” He notes that many Republicans worry their mission is doomed by Trump’s lack of party-building over the past two years, as well as his endorsement of “subpar” candidates, and party insiders suspect the rallies will do little to move the needle. Rather than focusing on the unglamorous work of winning campaigns — phone banking, door-knocking in non-pres years, and building party campaign infrastructure — Trump’s efforts have mostly involved flying into red states to churn out MAGA platitudes for audiences that already agree with him.

That points to another question Warren poses: “What is the closing message for the Republican Party in these midterms?” The latest rallies have featured broadsides against the “woke mob,” but Warren observes that the rhetoric ultimately circles back to the same “Make America Great Again” messaging Trump has been with diminishing returns for 10 years. “The details are different, specific to the state and the news and the whims of the president in the moment, but the song remains the same,” he writes. “The 2020 election. The ‘Dumbocrats.’ Fake news. The beautiful border wall. The low cost of gasoline (back during his first term, of course).”

At a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, Trump declared: “The oil is going to get down to where I had it. I had it down to $1.85 a gallon, and I’ll have it down to that number.”

But that kind of talk is falling flat. Polls show voters disapprove of Trump’s approach to everything from the economy to immigration to corruption. As a result, the president is increasingly turning back to his old refrains or trying new bribes.

As Warren concludes: “The only message, as it has been for a decade, is Trump. And as electoral disaster looms for the GOP, the party is only beginning to grapple with what the message will be afterward, on November 4 and in the months and years to come.” In the eleventh-hour stretch Warren describes, the immediate markers are whether the rally blitz registers at all — in turnout, in the closing polls, and in the results themselves once ballots are counted.