Most prediction models, including the one put together by The Times, foresee a Hillary Clinton win, but recent polls show her lead diminishing. As Nate Silver wrote on the 538 website on Sept. 6:

The clearest pattern is simply that Trump has regained ground since Clinton’s post-convention peak.

With the odds now favoring a narrow Clinton victory, what would the ramifications be after Nov. 8 if she beats Trump by three or fewer percentage points?

First and foremost, the anticipation of such a defeat has released in the Trump camp what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously described in 1964 as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”:

In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

The paranoia of the Trump campaign has found expression in the accusation that the Republican establishment in the primaries and now Hillary Clinton and her allies in the general election are committed to rigging the vote to prevent Trump’s rightful accession to the White House.

This has been on Trump’s mind for quite a while. On April 11, in the midst of the primary battle, Trump told “Fox and Friends”:

I won South Carolina. I won it by a landslide, like a massive landslide, and now they’re trying to pick off those delegates one by one. That’s not the way democracy is supposed to work. And you know, they offer them trips. They offer them all sorts of things. And you’re allowed to do that. And you’re allowed to offer trips and you can buy all these votes. What kind of a system is this? Now, I’m an outsider and I came into the system. And I’m winning the votes by millions of votes. But the system is rigged. It’s crooked.

With the nomination in hand, Trump declared in his convention acceptance speech:

Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place. They are throwing money at her because they have total control over everything she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings.

I am hardly alone in recognizing Hofstadter’s relevance today. Conor Lynch returned to Hofstadter this summer in Salon, for example.

It’s easy to see why. Hofstadter describes the paranoid style as

made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary.

Trump’s strongest supporters do in fact feel abominably persecuted. They are unlikely to fade away gracefully.