In Florida, where Democrats Bill Nelson and Andrew Gillum are still gaining votes in Broward County, Donald Trump is essentially demanding that the vote-counting be stopped, a recount prevented, and everyone move on with their lives. But different states require different approaches to ensure the outcome Republicans desire. For instance, in Arizona, where Democratic Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema now appears to be leading her opponent, Republican Martha McSally, Trump is calling for a new election entirely.

The current situation in Arizona could be a spectacular upset for Democrats, who haven’t held statewide office in a decade. As of Friday, Sinema is roughly 9,000 votes ahead of McSally, a 0.5 percent difference. It’s the slimmest of leads, but it would be enough to declare her the winner, particularly if mail-in ballots—which make up 1.7 million of the 2.3 million votes cast in the state—continue to be tallied in her favor. “It goes without saying that if Sinema gains significantly again in Maricopa County today, the race is over,” one party strategist told The Hill on Friday, referring to the county where she received a last-minute flush of votes, and where 345,000 votes remained uncounted. “Sinema’s jump in the numbers last night defied expectations and all logic.”

Of course, it’s also perfectly possible that McSally could make up the distance as more results are released, though the demographics would suggest otherwise: the counties with uncounted ballots largely lean Democratic. But the G.O.P. isn’t waiting around to find out. On Thursday night, despite the fact that there is no evidence of voter fraud, the Republican Party filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s method for verifying mail-in ballots, which involves a tedious process of manually matching the signatures on ballots to signatures in the voting system. In a statement accompanying the lawsuit, the Arizona G.O.P. accused Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes of “premeditated destruction of evidence” of voting irregularities, by mixing disputed ballots with undisputed ballots. “Every single lawful vote in Arizona should be counted,” said Arizona’s junior senator, Jon Kyl, in a statement. “And voting laws in our state should be applied uniformly across the map. Unfortunately, the Democrats legal strategy sounds an awful lot like an effort to disenfranchise voters from 11 counties from rural parts of our state and that’s troubling.” (In response, Cindy McCain, the widow of John McCain, tweeted: “I am one of those mail in ballots. I was under the impression my vote was always counted.”)

Other Trump minions took up the cry. “These democrat counties in Florida and Arizona are playing tricks because they just can’t accept the fact they lost,” tweeted Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale. “I will not be shocked if investigations lead to rampant fraud.” Of course, neither Parscale nor Trump offered any evidence to support their insinuations of Democratic criminality. Rather, both seem to be following a playbook that the Republican Party appears increasingly comfortable using in elections where the vote count has been close: dispute the results if you don’t like them, strenuously object to the established processes in place to accurately count ballots, and attempt to suppress the vote whenever possible.

It’s a chilling preview of how the president might react in 2020, should that election not go his way. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump frequently warned that the election might be rigged; even when he won, he appointed a sham executive commission to investigate his own baseless accusations that “millions” of illegal votes had been cast, and that Hillary Clinton had not actually won the popular vote. Now, as a handful of state contests wind on, Trump has again shown his hand, proving he’s perfectly willing to use the power and influence of the White House to bully public officials overseeing state and local elections.

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