The “midterm convention” held by the Republican Party in Dallas in early September was notable for some important political indicators regarding November’s elections. A number of Republican candidates skipped the two-day rally, especially those locked in tight races who may have wanted to avoid association with President Donald Trump’s low approval ratings. Some attendees tried to focus on Democratic political foibles and to cast their own party as the trustworthy mainstream choice.

Their efforts were undermined, however, by the words of the commander in chief during his second speech. After saying that “we want honesty in our country,” he led the crowd in pledging allegiance to himself as “the greatest president in the history of the United States.” Mr. Trump described the commitment he was looking for among his supporters: “I don’t care if I am registered [to vote] or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do.”

We should learn how to take a joke, Americans were told by the president’s handlers in the aftermath. It’s just Trump being Trump. Indeed, the president delivered his remarks to laughter during the convention. But at the same time that political opponents are supposed to shrug off his jokes about cheating in elections, Mr. Trump has been claiming—without evidence—that rampant voter fraud justifies unprecedented federal oversight of voting by mail. And he has repeatedly demanded that Congress impose new voter ID requirements, telling Republicans that the legislation would “guarantee the midterms.” These claims, seemingly, are not meant as jokes.

While the Supreme Court has sidelined the possibility of new regulations for mail-in ballots for now, and the Senate has refused to take up new voting legislation, both issues have introduced uncertainty into this November’s election. So, too, has a chaotic set of legal results about redistricting in Missouri. The chaos in Missouri began as part of the tit-for-tat mid-decade redistricting efforts by both Republicans and Democrats, which began after Mr. Trump successfully urged Republican legislators in Texas to redraw that state’s congressional districts in August 2025. After a citizen petition forced a referendum for new maps in Missouri, legal wrangling led to three Supreme Court actions on the matter just within the month of September.

The Missouri district map will likely factor in determining who controls the legislative branch for the next two years. For that reason, trying to tie up every race and every rule in litigation can be seen as politically advantageous. But seeking such advantage at every turn undermines the very foundation that elections themselves are standing on: the notion that it is politically acceptable to lose.

If you absolutely must win, and you cannot be sure of winning fairly, why not “cheat like hell”? Win at all costs surely seems like the only reasonable conclusion for politicians who feel this way about any particular election. But that sentiment is also a particularly un-American one. Just look at history.

Many America readers surely recall the landslide victory of Ronald Reagan in 1984, when the incumbent president won 525 electoral votes out of 538 cast and his party also kept control of the Senate. The outcome was a stinging blow for the Democrats—but it didn’t mean the end of the Democratic Party. Eight years later, Bill Clinton won more than twice the Electoral College votes than that of incumbent George H.W. Bush, and the Democrats also maintained majorities in both the Senate and the House. That did not mean the end of the Republican Party. Two short years later, the “Republican Revolution” gave the G.O.P. control over both the Senate and the House.

Back then, parties were motivated by the recognition that the back-and-forth of politics meant that defeats were only temporary. They knew it was in their interest, as well as in the country’s, for the wheels of the system to keep turning smoothly. But today’s political rhetoric depicts defeat as apocalyptic. This makes it seem unsafe for a party to lose an election—and insofar as it incentivizes rejection of political norms and the rule of law, it places the constitutional order itself at greater risk. While President Trump’s rhetoric is far more bombastic and dark than anything coming from the other side of the aisle, there, too, one can hear  the possibility of a Democratic loss described in doomsday terms that tend to mirror Mr. Trump’s excesses even as they aim to reject them.

This kind of rhetoric highlights the danger of an overweening cynicism that sees all politics as inherently corrupt and views every attempt to seek justice through political avenues as just another means to an end. Watergate, in this view, was just a political operation by Democrats to take power, not a stain on the nation’s history; ethical concerns raised over Supreme Court justices taking unreported gifts are just grandstanding, not a real challenge to judicial impartiality; recall efforts against corrupt public officials are just tactical maneuvers, not the exercise of the rule of law.

The flip side of that cynicism is found in the temptation before any analyst or editor to declare a pox on every house, to see elections as essentially amoral because neither party is worthy of unqualified support. To argue that “both sides do it” is a failure to reject practices that are eroding faith in democracy. The suggestion, even a joking one, by a sitting president that his followers should cheat, steal and lie their way to electoral victory continues the destructive rhetoric that began when Mr. Trump asserted that Joseph Biden rigged the 2020 election.

Mr. Biden, of course, did not rig that election. Nor are there vast numbers of Republicans plotting to cheat in this upcoming election. That is a prospect as ridiculous as the voting fraud that Mr. Trump still pretends to have led to his loss in the 2020 election. What is more probable—and problematic—is that Mr. Trump will again refuse to recognize an electoral loss as a rejection of his politics and policies. This will only push us further into a slow-motion constitutional crisis.

In the Book of Daniel, the prophet tells Nebuchadnezzar that every empire, however gleaming, will be shattered by a stone not cut by human hands (2:34). Daniel’s words are a rebuke and a promise to politicians in every age, a reminder that power can be lost as swiftly as it was gained. What is of lasting worth, instead, is the pursuit of justice, the effort to rule with wisdom and compassion, the desire to secure the common good. Those, we are promised, endure from age to age. In a democracy, they are preserved not by winning at all costs, but by respecting elections in which it is possible to lose.

This article appears in November 2026.