“Today we have thousands of men and women in uniform fighting for us overseas and they need our full backing,” he said. “We cannot be complacent about the determination of radical Islamic extremists to destroy our freedoms.”

As the full context of Bevin’s VVS remarks demonstrate, that’s pure spin. Bevin was clearly suggesting that bloodshed might be necessary domestically in the event of a Clinton victory. (You can watch the speech here.)

Yet the fact that Bevin is trying to walk it back also demonstrates just how extreme the statement is: a sitting governor suggesting publicly that armed insurrection might be necessary if a legitimate presidential election doesn’t go the way he wants.

Implications about armed revolt were somewhat common at the height of the Tea Party movement, and at the height of that Jefferson quote’s prominence. Few of the cries for uprising came from elected officials. In 2010, Sharron Angle, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Nevada, said that she hoped “Second Amendment remedies” would not be necessary to deal with a “tyrannical” government—while clearly leaving the option open. Her statement was a huge national controversy; she ended up losing to Senator Harry Reid that November.

The 2016 election has been so strange that Bevin’s remark may barely register. In August, Republican presidential nominee made reference to the possible assassination of either Hillary Clinton or Supreme Court nominees, saying, “If she gets the pick of her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I dunno.” Trump and his backers tried to play it off as a poorly executed joke.

Bevin’s comments do, however, underscore the apocalyptic attitudes aroused by this election, which has been unusually marked by fear. It is common for partisans on both sides to declare each new election “the most important of our lifetime” or something similar, but the nominations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have produced similar reactions from each candidate’s fiercest opponents: a sense not just that a loss would be catastrophic, and not even just the worst of a lifetime, but that it would be existentially dangerous to the United States.

Such sentiments are not unheard of; liberals threatened (and for the most part failed) to move to Canada if George W. Bush was reelected, while Tea Partiers foresaw doom if Obama was reelected, a prediction that has not yet been borne out—except perhaps by voters’ choices in 2016.

Trump, with his manifest ignorance of the Constitution and disregard for international norms, has been the greatest focus of this worry. Many conservative national-security figures have come out against him, warning that he is not fit to control the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. But as my colleague Molly Ball has written, fear may also be Trump’s most important tool in the election. Bevin’s speech is a reminder that Clinton’s opponents harbor apocalyptic fears too.