Shortly before midnight, my phone rings above the din, and it’s Steve Bannon. … Says Steve with barely contained ebullience, “We’ve got this!” And that’s my cue to head home. If Steve says we’ve won, we’ve won — no one crunches numbers better than Steve. And in 2016, he had gotten it exactly right early on election night, when everyone else had been moaning that the sky was falling. So I leave the East Wing … and head over to my office in the Eisenhower building. There, like Clark Kent, I pull off my suit and change into my workout clothes. I then throw my coat and gloves on, grab my bike … walk down the stairs and out the door, and pedal to the metal home in the brisk night air.

At 6:00 a.m., Bannon wakes me from a fitful sleep with a second phone call and this outrage: “They stole it!”

That was White House senior advisor Steve Navarro’s account of Election Night 2020, as taken from his 2021 book In Trump Time: A Journal of America’s Plague Year. Two days later, Navarro wrote in his journal: “Across the broad swath of battleground states, there appears to have been a cookie-cutter … effort to steal the election. Commonalities include: Halting of the vote count to determine just how big a margin would have to be erased by fraud; the appearance of large quantities of [harvested] bundled votes with questionable provenance; the inability of poll watchers to observe possible fraud; [and] the rejection of lawsuits based on the Catch-22 of an inability to provide evidence of fraud.”

We note Navarro’s grim account of the 2020 election because we have just 26 days until Election Day 2024, and the mainstream media is already preparing the American people for not an Election Day but an Election Week. As Karl Marx famously said, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

It began on September 13 with a New York Times piece by Nick Corasaniti titled, “Harris or Trump? Once Again, Election Results Could Take Awhile.” The article’s subhead reads: “More Americans are using mail-in ballots, which take longer to count than those cast in person. In several battleground states, a winner may not be apparent on Nov. 5.”

Here we go again. “For the second straight presidential election,” Corasaniti writes, “it is becoming increasingly likely that there will be no clear and immediate winner on election night and that early returns could give a false impression of who will ultimately prevail.”

What Corasaniti really means but is forbidden from saying is, “Early returns could give a false impression that Donald Trump will ultimately prevail.”

A week later, the Washington Post editorial board got into the act: “What election night 2024 might look like — and why you’ll need to be patient,” went the headline. It was followed by an ominous subhead: “Pennsylvania and Wisconsin still prohibit the counting of mail-in ballots until Election Day.”

Translation: Two crucial “Blue Wall” swing states with Democrat governors and Democrat-controlled urban centers won’t be reporting their results on Election Night. So be prepared for “early returns” that give “a false impression.”

“In 2020,” the Post’s editorial board writes, “the United States did not have election night so much as election week. Factors including a slow count of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania delayed declaring Joe Biden the winner until the Saturday after Election Day, giving President Donald Trump time to allege fraud — allegations that resulted in the Jan. 6, 2021, effort to overturn the results.”

Other media outlets have begun to grease the skids as well, casting a nefarious light on Republican efforts to ensure a free and fair election of eligible voters. As Reuters reports:

Donald Trump and his Republican allies are ratcheting up baseless claims that the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election could be skewed by widespread voting by non-citizens in a series of lawsuits that democracy advocates say are meant to sow distrust. At least eight lawsuits have been filed challenging voter registration procedures in four of the seven swing states expected to decide the election contest between Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

We’ll know soon enough whether the Republican Party’s new RNC chairman, Michael Whatley, has sufficiently improved on former chair Ronna McDaniel’s laissez-faire approach to election processes, but the early results are promising. Those eight lawsuits wouldn’t have been filed during McDaniel’s tenure, but Whatley is a fighter.

In the wake of 2020’s Red Wave That Wasn’t, I’d hoped (and written) that the Republicans should fight tooth-and-nail, hammer-and-claw, to return Election Day to what it always had been in this country. As columnist Deroy Murdock wrote at the time, “Rather than switch, Republicans should fight. … According to 2 U.S. Code § 7, ‘the Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year’ is the date for electing members of Congress and, quadrenially, per 3 U.S. Code § 1, presidential delegates to the Electoral College. These laws specify November — not October, much less September.”

Besides, early voting is like a jury rendering a verdict before hearing all the evidence.

Since 2020, though, the consensus has settled on the GOP joining the Democrats rather than beating them. Rather than fighting for Election Day instead of Election Season, rather than litigating our election processes, the GOP needs to do a better job of what the Democrats have clearly already mastered: voting early, harvesting ballots, and wringing every last vote out of every last neighborhood and precinct.

Indeed, a recent NBC News poll shows that 51% of registered voters plan to vote early. That early voting group is still heavily weighted toward the Democrats, but Republicans have begun to close the gap, especially in the crucial swing states.

None of this suggests that the Democrats won’t try to pull some of the same middle-of-the-night shenanigans they did in 2020. The specter of bulk-mail balloting still looms large, but at least the Republicans will be on guard this time. Beyond that, Trump’s polling numbers are far stronger today against Harris than they were on the same day four years ago against Biden. Indeed, both Republican and Democrat polling analysts are “bullish” on Trump’s chances.

And, hey, let’s remember: If it’s not close, they can’t cheat.