Steve M makes a good point here. It may not be Trump who refuses to accept the results of the election. According to the new Melania book, he was prepared to slink over to his golf club in Scotland rather than have to face Clinton’s victory:
[T]he election results might still be disputed — by rank-and-file voters, the right-wing media, and state and local GOP officials.
If a new Politico story is accurate, the latter group is living in a world of epistemic closure — they don’t believe the polls, they don’t believe a Biden victory is possible, and, implicitly, they won’t believe the result in November even if Joe Biden wins decisively. They might just be repeating the company line to a reporter, but it sounds to me as if they genuinely believe what they’re saying:
“The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies support for Trump,” said Phillip Stephens, GOP chairman in Robeson County, N.C., one of several rural counties in that swing state that shifted from supporting Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. “We’re calling him ‘Teflon Trump.’ Nothing’s going to stick, because if anything, it’s getting more exciting than it was in 2016.”
This year, Stephens said, “We’re thinking landslide.”
… from the Eastern seaboard to the West Coast and the battlegrounds in between, there is an overriding belief that, just as Trump defied political gravity four years ago, there’s no reason he won’t do it again.
… Lawrence Tabas, the chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, went so far as to predict that Trump would not only carry his state, but beat Biden by more than 100,000 votes — more than twice the margin he mustered in 2016.
“Contrary to what may be portrayed in the media, there’s still a high level of support out there,” said Kyle Hupfer, chairman of the Indiana Republican Party. He described himself as “way more” optimistic than he was at this point in 2016.
… in the states, the Republican Party’s rank-and-file are largely unconvinced that the president is precariously positioned in his reelection bid.
“The narrative from the Beltway is not accurate,” said Joe Bush, chairman of the Republican Party in Muskegon County, Mich., which Trump lost narrowly in 2016. “Here in the heartland, everybody is still very confident, more than ever.”
… At the center of the disconnect between Trump loyalists’ assessment of the state of the race and the one based on public opinion polls is a distrust of polling itself. Republicans see an industry that maliciously oversamples Democrats or under-samples the white, non-college educated voters who are most likely to support Trump. They say it is hard to know who likely voters are this far from the election. And like many Democrats, they suspect Trump supporters disproportionately hang up on pollsters, under-counting his level of support.
Ted Lovdahl, chairman of the Republican Party in Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District, said he has friends who will tell pollsters “just exactly the opposite of what they feel.”
When he asked one of them why, his friend told him, “I don’t like some of their questions. It’s none of their business what I do.”
Steve M wonders the same thing I do:
Joe Biden won’t really win by that 14-point margin seen in a recent CNN poll. He might not win at all. But there’s a decent chance he could win by 5 to 7 points, with a decisive Electoral College margin. Will these local Republican leaders believe the results? Will GOP voters? Will Fox News and Republican elected officials give up and accept the results, or will they claim that five or six million votes were cast fraudulently?
The rank and file Trump voters have been brainwashed more thoroughly than any faction since the South in the civil war. Between Trump himself, Fox News, right-wing media, Facebook and hate radio, they are convinced he is hugely popular and it’s only the mainstream media that’s making it seem to be even close. They will be seriously confused and upset.
Trump may take off for his golf club and hole up there so he doesn’t have to face his own ignominy. But his people have nowhere to go. And they may not accept this challenge to everything they were led to believe. It could be … ugly.