CLEVELAND -- When you lose the popular vote in six out of seven presidential elections, it’s more than a coincidence. It’s a trend.

For Republicans, desperate times call for desperate measures -- especially given the near certainty that, no matter who wins the presidency Nov. 3, the nation’s voters will run that popular vote losing streak to seven of eight.

Blessed with more creativity than conscience, some GOP leaders may be tempted by another way to defy the relentless change in the nation’s demographics and win again this year. At its heart this strategy -- glimmerings of which are already visible -- reflects an abandonment of any belief in the sanctity of free, fair and open elections.

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown knows a plot when he sees it. “They will do everything they can to suppress the vote,” Brown told me Monday. “Clearly, somebody has told [President] Trump if everybody votes, Republicans lose.”

The GOP’s first attempt to prevent poor and minority voters from participating in democracy was in Wisconsin, where Republicans used every dirty trick short of a poll tax to drive down turnout in the state’s early April primary election.

With voters fearful of the deadly coronavirus, the entire Republican establishment, with an assist from the U.S. Supreme Court, conspired in opposing an extension of that state’s presidential primary, intentionally creating Election Day chaos on a day when many poll workers understandably stayed home.

In Democrat-dominated Milwaukee, most polling places weren’t even open. The unstated purpose of this plot was to guarantee the re-election of a Trump-backed, conservative member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, who was opposed by a liberal Democrat.

Few gave the Democrat a chance – except those voters who put their health at risk and spent hours waiting to vote. When they counted the votes April 13, the incumbent Republican got clobbered.

Bad sign for the GOP, as Wisconsin is one of the Big Four at the top of the 2020 list of battleground states, along with Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Even before the GOP’s gigantic Wisconsin failure, President Donald Trump made baseless allegations about the dangers of mail voting, claiming that it increases fraud.

“Mail-in voting is horrible,” Trump said April 7. “It’s corrupt.”

If President Trump says it, millions believe it. And it doesn’t matter one bit if it’s unsupported by a single shred of evidence.

“There is no real vote fraud,” countered Brown, Ohio’s secretary of state and chief election officer from 1983 through 1990. “Nobody’s going to try to vote multiple times. It’s too risky. You could go to prison for it.”

After winning the presidency in 2016, but losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by more than three million votes, Trump repeatedly insisted he won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, attributing the discrepancy to “the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Days after taking office, President Trump appointed a commission to weed out the massive vote fraud. In the summer of 2018, the commission was disbanded, finding precious little evidence of the widespread cheating Trump claimed existed.

In February 2017, an investigation by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican who is now lieutenant governor, found 82 non-U.S. citizens who had illegally voted in one or more recent elections. Ohio has more than six million registered voters.

If there is a Trump-led effort to restrict access to mail voting prior to the Nov. 3 election, it is unlikely Ohio will be a target of it, as Gov. Mike DeWine and Secretary of State Frank LaRose seem committed to protecting Ohio’s fairly generous access to absentee mail voting.

Ohioans now have 28 days of in-person and no-fault absentee voting. Should coronavirus health risks exist as the Nov. 3 election nears, LaRose said his office “is preparing for those types of contingencies” with possible changes that would make it easier for Ohioans to vote without fear of losing their lives.

Asked about vote fraud, LaRose deviated from the White House script with some ad-libbed honesty.

“Voting fraud is extremely rare in Ohio and we work hard to keep it rare,” he said. “We have significant safeguards in place with the way we do vote by mail in Ohio.”

If Team Trump leaves Ohio alone, most of its anti-democracy efforts are likely to focus on the four big battleground states mentioned above, plus North Carolina and Arizona.

The sobering truth for Republicans of all stripes is that as long as their party continues to appeal primarily to white voters, it is an endangered species. The last Brookings Institute report on Census Bureau population projections, issued in 2018, concluded the country will become “minority white” in 2045. That gives the GOP a quarter century to either abandon its current strategy or slide into extinction.

In his best-selling book, “Why We’re Polarized,” journalist Ezra Klein writes, “Republicans know that their coalition is endangered, buffeted by demographic headwinds and an aging base, and that has injected an almost manic urgency into their strategy.”

Long term, the GOP’s prospects are incredibly bleak. Given the infatuation millions have for President Trump, the short-term is more promising.

Just because Trump can’t win a fair fight Nov. 3 doesn’t mean he can’t win.

Brent Larkin was The Plain Dealer’s editorial director from 1991 until his retirement in 2009.

To reach Brent Larkin: blarkin@cleveland.com

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