Holt’s question, however, had been whether Trump would recognize the integrity of the election result, not support a victorious Clinton. Trump’s conditional clause—“If she wins”—hung in the air as the debate concluded. If, in November, election officials report a Clinton win but Trump has his doubts, then what?

Shortly after the debate, a reporter helped clarify Trump’s view by repeating Holt’s question to the candidate: Would Trump accept the election’s outcome? “Oh yes, absolutely, I will,” Trump responded.

More than any presidential candidate in recent memory, Trump has questioned the legitimacy of the U.S. electoral process. But he’s now on record agreeing to accept the result of that process. On Monday night, he retreated, at least temporarily, from a position that could have corrosive consequences for democracy in the United States.

For months now, and particularly when he’s struggled in the polls, Trump has argued not only that the U.S. political system is rigged against him and non-Washington/Wall Street elites, but that the vote on Election Day could be too. He’s warned that some people might “vote 10 times” and that he’ll only lose the state of Pennsylvania if Clinton cheats. “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!” Trump implores on his website, where you can sign up as a “Trump Election Observer.” The Trump campaign has expressed concerns over lax voter-identification laws and the potential hacking of electronic voting machines, but has provided little substantive evidence for why voter fraud, which nowadays is very rare in the United States, might be more widespread this election cycle.

Trump is far from the first presidential candidate to accuse opponents of attempting to mess with the election outcome; in 2008, for example, John McCain claimed that the voter-registration group ACORN was trying to tip the election for Barack Obama by “perpetrating one of the greatest frauds” in American history. But Trump has made the allegation more central to his campaign than many of his predecessors did. Hence why Lester Holt felt the need to ask his question.

And Trump has found an especially receptive audience. A recent Pew Research Center poll of registered voters found that only 11 percent of Trump supporters are “very confident” that votes across the country will be accurately counted on Election Day, compared with 49 percent of Clinton supporters. Thirty-six percent of American voters as a whole doubt that the reported outcome will be accurate. (Americans tend to be more confident that their own vote will be counted accurately, but even here there is significant skepticism among Trump supporters.)

Confidence of American Voters in Accuracy of 2016 Vote

Pew also found that confidence in the integrity of the election result has been declining for years among Republican voters.