Former president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures during a campaign rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Monday, the night before Election Day.

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It's possible that former President Donald Trump will win the election – and it's also entirely possible that he will lose. But many in Trump's circle continue to falsely tell his supporters that this can only happen through fraud.

Polls suggest a closely contested race to decide whether Trump or Vice President Harris becomes the next president in seven battleground states – states where there are no guaranteed winners due to the political and demographic makeup of voters .

Trump still insists he did not lose the 2020 election, despite numerous recounts and lawsuits that found no evidence of fraud. His 2024 campaign is built on that foundation, telling his supporters that the only way to “make America great again in a second term” is to vote in such a way that his victory could be “too big to manipulate.”

Much of Trump's final message in recent weeks has focused on attacking every result other than victory as tainted, illegitimate and fraudulent, without any evidence or basis in reality.

He has regularly questioned the legality of Harris' role as the Democratic presidential nominee and called President Biden's decision to end his re-election bid and her subsequent selection under Democratic Party rules a “coup.”

After his supporters launched a failed insurrection attempt at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump still refused to say whether he would accept the results of this election, win or lose.

Eric Trump and his wife, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, high-fived during a rally for former President Donald Trump in Reading, Pennsylvania, on Monday.

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Together with the Republican National Committee, led by his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, Trump's legal team has laid the groundwork to commit censure in several key states, such as Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, if he loses, and to file numerous lawsuits to disqualify voters and ballots or, in their opinion, demanding rule changes suppresses Republican voters.

The final days of the campaign have seen a flood of unsubstantiated claims about election rules, possible election results and Trump's chances of winning against a constellation of his family, friends and loyal companions.

Claiming a “decisive Republican victory” on the social media site.

On Monday, Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. caused a stir in a partially empty North Carolina arena by urging people to show up to vote en masse so that “they don't give (the Democrats) a week to get that magic truck full of ballots.” to find.”

Trump himself has posted online that “Pennsylvania is cheating,” and he often devotes portions of his sprawling rallies to accusing his opponents of cheating while boasting about often inflated poll numbers.

At his second-to-last presidential campaign rally Monday night in Pittsburgh, Trump said he had been given “about a 96.2 percent chance” of winning on Tuesday, but there was no evidence of that.

Many factors contribute to Trump losing – or winning

Polls, election analysts and calculations suggest Trump does not have a 96.2 percent chance of winning enough states to become the Electoral College winner. The reason the race is instead very close is not fraud, but rather several potential warning signs in his third presidential campaign and voters' reaction to it.

Reverberations of the public and private pressure campaign he waged to get Republican lawmakers and officials to overturn his 2020 defeat are being felt in several of the swing states. In the 2022 midterm elections, several high-profile Trump-backed candidates who embraced false fraud allegations failed in what should have been a good year for Republicans.

His feuds with Republicans who defended the election results led to a significant loss of support among independent voters and conservatives who opposed his candidacy.

The RNC's efforts to gain traction with nonwhite voters in the last election cycle were abandoned in favor of increased election integrity teams. As a result, much of the voting process was outsourced to inexperienced third parties.

After the Supreme Court handed down the long-standing Roe v. Wade's vote, which guaranteed a national right to abortion care, Republicans have lost ground among women, particularly in states that passed strict abortion bans after that decision.

In many states, Trump's appeal to Republicans to “save your vote” and participate in early voting appears to have paid off, but election data also shows that a significant share of voters defected from Election Day onwards. That could potentially lead to lower Republican turnout on Tuesday, part of an overall shift in voter behavior since the pandemic-era 2020 presidential campaign.

All of these factors could cause Trump to lose when all the votes are counted or be significant if he wins, but none of them have anything to do with the widespread voter fraud for which he has baselessly prepared his supporters.