According to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll, 73 percent of Republicans say the election could be stolen from Trump by voter fraud. The profound threat to democracy created by a major party nominee encouraging his voters not to accept the results of the election has even Republicans getting nervous.

But if they say that Trump has gone too far, they have only themselves to blame.

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We’ve seen this pattern again and again in this election. Here’s how it works:

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Trump takes something Republicans have implied or tried to subtly exploit, and presents it in a much more literal, and often vulgar, way. The idea comes under greater scrutiny, and it becomes impossible for any sensible observer to treat it as though it isn’t factually bogus, morally despicable, or both. Supposedly sensible Republicans claim that they’re deeply troubled by what Trump is saying.

So on immigration, Republicans say we need strong border security, and Trump comes right out and says Mexicans are rapists and we need to build a wall. Republicans advocate “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and Trump says “torture works,” and even it doesn’t we should do it because “they deserve it anyway” (and we should kill their families to boot). Republicans warn of “Sharia law” but say they aren’t anti-Muslim, and Trump just says, let’s go ahead and ban Muslims from entering the United States.

And now Republicans are shocked, shocked that Trump would work so hard to delegitimize the electoral process. Here are some excerpts from a New York Times article today on the reaction to all his talk of a rigged election:

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Jon A. Husted, the secretary of state of Ohio, said it was “wrong and engaging in irresponsible rhetoric” for any candidate to question the integrity of elections without evidence. Mr. Husted, a Republican, said he would have no reason to hesitate to certify the results of the election… Chris Ashby, a Republican election lawyer, said Mr. Trump’s attacks on the electoral process were unprecedented and risked creating a fiasco on Election Day. Mr. Ashby also said that Mr. Trump was “destabilizing” the election by encouraging his supporters to deputize themselves as amateur poll monitors, outside the bounds of the law… Yet other Republicans are appalled at Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread fraud, which are now a staple of his stump speech. “It is so irresponsible because what he’s doing really goes to the heart of our democracy,” said Trey Grayson, a Republican and former secretary of state of Kentucky. “What is great about America is that we change our leaders at the ballot box, not by bullets,” Mr. Grayson said.

How is it possible that the Republican nominee for president would be able to convince so many people that the voting will be rigged? Maybe it’s because conservative media figures and Republican politicians have for years been saying that ACORN, an organization that was focused in part on registering poor people to vote, was in the business of stealing elections. Indeed, even though ACORN went out of business in 2010, for years afterward Republicans continued to insert provisions into spending bills banning the group from receiving federal money. A group that no longer existed. After the 2012 election, half of Republicans said in one poll that they believed this non-existent organization stole the election for Obama.

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If you’re wondering why when he’s in Pennsylvania, Trump will tell his nearly all-white audiences to watch the polls in “certain areas,” look no further than Fox News’ extraordinary campaign to convince its viewers that a 2008 incident in Philadelphia — in which a couple of knuckleheads from the New Black Panther Party stood outside a polling place glaring menacingly at voters — was a crime on par with the Rape of Nanking or the Armenian genocide. In one two-week period in 2010, Megyn Kelly did 45 separate segments on the New Black Panther case, despite the fact that George W. Bush’s Justice Department decided it was too trivial to merit any criminal charges.

Or if you’re wondering why Trump supporters are so eager to believe that the vote will be rigged, perhaps you could find the explanation in the fact that the GOP in the last few years has embarked on an extraordinary campaign of vote suppression aimed primarily at minorities, which they’ve justified with the claim that massive vote fraud takes place in American elections.

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There are approximately zero prominent Republicans who have raised any objections to this effort, which includes things like ID requirements, restrictions on early voting (particularly on Sundays, when African-American churches often mount “souls to the polls” drives), and moves to make it somewhere between difficult and impossible for non-profit organizations to register voters.

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With the possible exception of the claim that the insane regulations Republican legislatures impose on abortion clinics are intended only to safeguard women’s health, there is no more disingenuous argument anyone offers in American politics today than the idea that Republican vote suppression efforts are truly about stopping voter fraud. Indeed, the kind of fraud that things like ID requirements prevent — voter impersonation, where one person claims to be another person in order to cast an illegal vote — is an astonishingly inefficient way to attempt to steal an election, which is why it almost never happens. One researcher conducted a comprehensive investigation of elections from 2000 to 2014 and was able to find only 31 credible allegations of voter impersonation in the entire country, during a period where over a billion votes were cast.

So let’s be honest: When Republican legislatures try to make it as hard as possible for certain people to register and vote, they know that their warnings about the supposedly dire threat of voter impersonation are, as the late Antonin Scalia would have said, pure applesauce. As a judge in a case involving North Carolina’s restrictions put it, despite Republicans’ insistence that they were only concerned with the integrity of the election, the law in question was actually constructed to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” In other states, Republican legislatures have been broader in their vote suppression efforts; for instance, a law passed in Texas would accept hunting licenses as valid ID to vote, but not student IDs from state universities. The fact that Republicans can claim without breaking into gales of uproarious laughter that that’s about anything other than making it harder for Democrats to get to the polls is a tribute to their commitment to their cause.

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