In echo of 2020, Trump claims he’ll lose only if Democrats ‘cheat’

Few people have invested more personal time and energy in anything than Donald Trump has invested in convincing the world, and perhaps himself, that he is more popular than the publicly available evidence would suggest.

Trump has been the Republican nominee twice before, earning about 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016 and about 7 million fewer votes than Joe Biden four years later. His response each time was to insist that the numbers were wrong or insignificant or both, claiming after 2016 that there was some undetected fraud that led to his losing California and New Hampshire (among other places) and claiming after 2020 that there was undetected fraud, well, everywhere.

There were lots of other claims, too, of course, and lots of other rationalizations. (How many times has Trump boasted about getting more votes than any sitting president, ignoring that his opponent got far more?) But there are also many other facets of his efforts to prove that his popularity extends beyond the visible world. How else can we explain his obsession with the size of rally crowds or with television ratings or with the number of people who engage with him on social media? There’s only one throughline: Trump is wildly popular, no matter what you might have heard on CNN at 11 o’clock Eastern time on election night.

As we saw in the aftermath of the 2020 election, the point of intersection between Trump’s interest in proving his popularity and actual electoral outcomes is a dangerous place to be. Trump spent much of his last year in office insisting that his reelection was all-but-certain unless Democrats cheated — which, he said repeatedly (without evidence but with bad argumentation), they were planning to do. Then he lost, and there was chaos.

He is at it again. At a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday, Trump insisted that the only way he could lose in November would be if his opponents were to cheat.

“Our primary focus is not to get out the vote,” he said. “It’s to make sure they don’t cheat, because we have all the votes you need. You can see at every house along the way, has signs: Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump-Vance, Trump-Vance.”

People familiar with political campaigns can’t read this sentence because they just smacked their foreheads in disbelief. Disbelief first of all at the contrast Trump draws between not needing to turn out votes and there are lots of votes out there. Which is why you want to have a good turnout/get-out-the-vote operation, to ensure those ballots are cast. To show my age, it’s like the episode of “The Simpsons” in which Bart runs for class president. He has the most support — but none of his friends bother voting.

That assumes that the votes are actually out there, of course, of which — the other reason all those foreheads that got smacked — lawn signs are not a strong indicator. Candidates like lawn signs because they feel like a measure of support. But they are not. They aren’t according to research, they aren’t as his allies have seen, and they aren’t as he should have seen. They are no more an indication of robust political support than, say, a nonscientific poll conducted by a partisan on social media.

Something like that could be considered illustrative or useful only by someone motivated to view it that way.

In the abstract, the confidence that Trump and his allies exude, however sincere, is odd. Vice President Kamala Harris is leading in the polls and getting more people at her rallies, and the Democratic convention is even getting more viewership on television. Trump’s efforts to deny or ignore all of this is not particularly healthy.

But we aren’t operating in the abstract. We’re operating in a world where Trump insisted that he hadn’t lost the 2020 election, which he lost, and in which even the supporters who didn’t violently assault the Capitol still generally believe that’s true.

One shift that has occurred since Harris became the Democratic nominee (after Biden stood aside a month ago) is that, according to YouGov polling, Americans are less likely to say that they assume Trump will win in November. That is true of Republicans, too. At the time of the Republican convention, Americans were more likely to think Trump would win than Biden by a more than 20-point margin. Republicans were more than 80 points more likely to say they thought Trump would win.

Then Harris became the Democratic nominee, and perceptions of who will win have drawn even. That’s in part because Democratic confidence in their candidate has risen. It’s in part, too, because Republicans are less confident than they were. And that’s not a measure of some new cheating scheme that accompanied Harris; it’s clearly mostly a recognition that she is polling better.

But this perception hasn’t made its way up to the guy at the top of the Republican ticket. Instead of saying — as candidates often do and as Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, did on Wednesday — that the race is close and that he, therefore, needs his base to commit to voting, Trump says it all comes down to imaginary cheating. The Republican Party, now led in part by his daughter-in-law, is investing in this approach, as well, focusing on poll-watchers and recruiting lawyers to challenge results. Actual turnout is being handed off to outside groups that have as much incentive to fundraise as to get Trump elected.

Trump can lose in November, and, if history is any guide, he may well get fewer votes than Harris. But he can’t or won’t acknowledge this, and his team and supporters can’t or won’t act as if it’s a possibility as a result. Instead, there is an entire economy centered on proving just how popular Trump is.

We’ll get a hard count in November.