In the face of a sharp slide in his poll numbers against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has done the unthinkable in a campaign of braggadocio and bombast: admit that he is in trouble.
In the past week, as Clinton has moved to an average lead of seven points and a 80-plus per cent chance of winning the White House in November, Trump has acknowledged the steep climb he faces against the former US secretary of state.
At a campaign event in Florida last week, he conceded that his campaign was "having a tremendous problem in Utah", a state that traditionally swings Republican. He would need help in Ohio, he added, and would depend on evangelical Christian voters in Virginia who didn't turn out to vote for Mitt Romney in 2012.
These were rare admissions of weakness but he has gone further. When he is not acknowledging problems with his own campaign, he is explaining away his potential loss in the November ballot to Clinton by alleging that the electoral system is stacked against him, an outsider trying to play an insider game but disadvantaged by unfair rules.
At a rally last week in Pennsylvania – a state that he must win if his anti-trade "America First" campaign has any hope with frustrated voters in hollowed-out steel mining towns of the mid-Atlantic state – the New York billionaire declared that there was only one way he could lose the state: if it's stolen from him.
He urged law enforcement officials and his own supporters to monitor polling stations for electoral fraud, namely voter impersonation and multiple voting.
“The only way they can beat it in my opinion – and I mean this 100 per cent – is if in certain sections of the state, they cheat, okay?” Trump told his supporters. “So I hope you people can sort of, not just vote on the 8th, go around and look and watch other polling places and make sure that it’s 100 per cent fine.”
At an August 1st rally in Ohio, another battleground state he must win, Trump made similar claims, telling his supporters: “November 8th, we’d better be careful because that election is going to be rigged. People are going to walk in and they’re going to vote 10 times, maybe who knows?”
The allegations are consistent not just with the property tycoon’s long-running complaints that he is fighting a “rigged” system in this election – both in the primary against the Republican establishment and against the system in the general election – but with his attack on the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s election through the lead role he played in the so-called “birther” movement that queried the president’s place of birth.
Excuses in early
Trump, it appears, is attempting to get his excuses in early in a face-saving move that feeds the grievances of his supporters frustrated with the status quo that he is trying to up-end. That he may be trying to spin his possible loss in the November election in August is startling, but it feeds the suspicions of his voters and mobilises support.
"He's laying some groundwork for later calling the election illegitimate," said Lorraine Minnite, an associate professor of public policy at Rutgers University in New Jersey and the author of The Myth of Voter Fraud.
“He is using language like he did in Pennsylvania to create this idea that he is invincible, that he has majority support and the only way he would lose is if there is cheating at the polls. That resonates clearly with people this year. It is easy for them to grasp that there is cheating going on that is depriving people of a Trump victory.”
The businessman has pointed to alleged vote-rigging in Obama's 2012 defeat of Romney to support his claims – allegations that have been discredited – but the striking-down of voter ID laws in Pennsylvania and North Carolina since the last election have fuelled fears among his supporters that this election could be stolen.
The ramifications of claiming an illegitimate election, particularly before his angry and passionate supporters, is viewed as irresponsible and potentially dangerous by some.
This is not just because of the damage it causes to the integrity of the democratic process, creating a degree of nihilism about governance, but because it could prompt a different kind of response following Trump’s remarks last week that “second amendment” gun-rights activists are the only people who can stop Clinton winning the election.
"It just takes one deranged extremist follower to take off-the-cuff sentiments more seriously than they were intended and connect the dots," said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington and a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton who fears a repeat of the violent events of 1968 in this election year.
"If their hero says that the next president of the United States is illegitimate, a liberty-loving patriot might be willing to take matters into their own hands."