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The massive marches this weekend will be remembered as the starting point of a massive protest movement against President Donald Trump, but what will become of the sleeping giant that has awakened?

If the extraordinary energy that was on display across the country is effectively channeled into electoral politics, some of the long-term demographic trends that Trump's victory obscured will accelerate. He could be the last Republican elected president for a long time.

But a new protest movement could also upend the Democratic establishment, just like the tea party movement did eight years ago. With the president viewed as illegitimate by so many progressive activists, even small compromises will be viewed as apostasy. This could fuel nasty primary challenges, without a president in the White House to stop them, and prompt a lurch to the left that would make it harder to topple Trump in 2020.

FOR REPUBLICANS, THE CAUTIONARY TALE OF PROPOSITION 187:

The protests foreshadowed the long-term damage that Trump might be inflicting on the Republican brand. I found myself wondering what percentage of people in the streets hadn't voted in 2016 and whether they will in 2020. Both statistics are important but unknowable.

Trump is a reactionary figure, but the long arc of American history bends toward reform. With his pledge to "make America great again," the septuagenarian president tapped into nostalgia for a bygone era among fellow baby boomers. But the "good old days" were not so good for lots of folks, including but not limited to women, gays, Latinos and African Americans.

Every time Trump did something like attack Judge Gonzalo Curiel, which House Speaker Paul Ryan called the textbook definition of a racist comment, I raised the specter of Proposition 187 in this space. California Republican Gov. Pete Wilson embraced a ballot measure to deny all public services, including education and health care, to undocumented immigrants. The idea was to adopt a wedge issue that would gin up the base and woo disgruntled independents as the state struggled to fight its way out of the post-Cold War recession. Wilson ran ads with footage of Mexicans running across the border. "They keep coming," a narrator said ominously. The campaign to push the ballot initiative was called "Save Our State," as in SOS.

What a lot of people forget about Prop 187 is that the gambit worked - in the short-term. Republicans cleaned up in that election, though the measure was quickly blocked by a federal court. But while Wilson won the battle, Republicans lost the war. The GOP candidate for president carried California in nine of the 10 presidential elections before 1992. Democrats have won handily in all six elections since Prop 187.

Significantly, Prop 187 didn't just alienate a generation of Latinos, galvanizing them to register to vote and get engaged in the political process. It also repelled moderate suburban whites who wanted no part of nativism and xenophobia. To be sure, correlation is not causation. There were demographic trends that were making the state bluer before the measure passed, but it supercharged them.

Latinos were not inevitably going to become a lynchpin of the Democratic coalition. Just compare California to Texas, where George W. Bush proved during his gubernatorial bids around the same time that a conservative can make inroads with the community.

National conservative leaders warned publicly in 1994 that what Wilson was doing would hurt the whole party in the long term, just as they did when Trump launched his campaign by declaring that many Mexican immigrants are rapists, criminals and drug traffickers. "He's scapegoating, damn it, and he should stop doing it," Bill Bennett, who had been Ronald Reagan's Education secretary, said of Wilson at the time.

While Trump won the election in the Rust Belt, he was weaker than past Republicans in the Sunbelt. Mitt Romney carried Arizona by nine points in 2012, for example, but Trump only won by 3.6 percent. It's hard to imagine the Grand Canyon State not being in play next time. And don't forget that a shift of fewer than 100,000 votes would have tipped Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan to Hillary Clinton. It's not like he can count on a realignment working to his advantage.

One small but telling illustration of how little the Trump administration actually cares about expanding his coalition:The Spanish-language version of Whitehouse.gov no longer exists. You get a 404 error if you try to visit.

FOR DEMOCRATS, A CAUTIONARY TALE IN THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT:

Right now, the Democratic coalition is united in opposition to Trump. But the edifice could begin to show cracks as issues like Obamacare replacement and infrastructure spending come to the forefront.

While a lot of establishment leaders - like John Kerry - came out for the Women's March, it was revealing that the leading candidates for DNC chair were instead courting deep-pocketed donors at a conference put on by David Brock in Florida. That they were not out in the streets, standing in solidarity, didn't go unnoticed among some grassroots leaders.

The Democratic establishment is giddy right now about all the new enthusiasm, but veteran organizers warn that it will be harder than it looks to channel it toward sustained engagement in the political arena. "Saturday's marches, which featured speeches from many leading Democrats, were not explicitly Democratic events," The Washington Post's Dave Weigel and Jenna Portnoy note. "Melissa Byrne, a candidate for DNC vice chairman, said that the crowds . . . will encourage even more people to become activists. But having organized for Barack Obama's 2008 campaign and for the Occupy D.C. movement, she saw how the new activists would be tested even if the rallies grew in size. 'People are going to get frustrated, because you want your wins to come quickly,' she said. 'For people who are new to this, it takes a while to get that.'"

After the governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey this fall, next year's biggest battles in the midterm elections will play out on deeply-red terrain. There are just two clearly at-risk GOP senators up for reelection, in Nevada and Arizona. Jeff Flake, the Arizona senator, is more worried about getting toppled during the primary by a challenger who has the endorsement of President Trump than losing in the general election. Few GOP senators have separated themselves more from Trump.

To be sure, something that made Saturday so special was how many marches took place in red states and small towns where Trump dominated. The Post's Jose DelReal notes that sizable crowds gathered in places like Wichita, Kansas, rural towns in Virginia, and throughout the South: "In Anchorage, thousands of protesters gathered despite an unforgiving snowstorm and 10-degree temperatures, holding signs with slogans such as 'My body. My rights. My choice.' Farther north, in Fairbanks, thousands were undeterred by the extreme temperature, which approached minus-20 degrees. At the same time, thousands marched outside the Idaho Statehouse in Boise as snow fell over them."

But party leaders could quickly lose control of the energy, if they don't play their cards right. Take Nevada. The smartest operatives on both sides agree that Sen. Dean Heller is the most vulnerable GOP incumbent on the ballot next year. But what happens if the Democratic Party - now that Harry Reid has ridden off into the sunset - nominates its own Sharron Angle, who subsequently blows a totally winnable race? People like Angle and Christine O'Donnell only got oxygen in the 2010 primaries because the tea party movement turned on the governing class.

Furthermore, Trump's success as a first-time candidate will embolden an array of celebrities and billionaires to consider coming out of the woodwork. Keep an eye on Mark Zuckerberg, Howard Schultz and Mark Cuban. They'd try to run as outsiders and use their fortunes to tap into this activist energy. It could lead to a very messy battle over what it means to be a Democrat.

James Hohmann is a national political correspondent for The Washington Post.

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The liberal tea party movement has begun. What will become of it? - Chicago Tribune