Yesterday, just two weeks out from an election in which Donald Trump has clearly and undeniably seized the momentum, James Carville said something that gave me pause.

“I think that Harris is going to win,” Carville told MSNBC’s Ari Melber. “Let me just say that out front. I’m doubling down on that.”

Maybe Carville was just putting on a brave face, trying to buck up the troops amid a steady surge of bad polling. But that wouldn’t be in his nature. When it comes to his party’s electoral fortunes, and especially its shortcomings, he’s been remarkably candid over the years.

Kamala Harris is hemorrhaging voters, and Donald Trump is drawing them in. According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, Trump is now winning in every frontline battleground state: He’s winning in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.

So, what does James Carville know that the rest of us don’t know?

Perhaps part of the answer could be found in the comments of a certain swing state bureaucrat whose office is responsible for running statewide elections. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said this weekend that she expects to have election results “by end of the day Wednesday” — the day after the election. “Well, you know, in 2020, we had the results of our highest turnout election in Michigan history within 24 hours of the polls closing,” she bragged. “The unofficial results were completed by 8 p.m. on Wednesday. So we’re tracking that again this year.”

Great. We need to be patient. Just like The New York Times and The Washington Post have been telling us. Because if we’re patient, the Democrats will have plenty of time to, ahem, find the necessary votes.

In 2020, Florida showed how a large state could tally its votes — including a whole bunch of absentee votes from elderly folks and service members — and report them on election night. So why can’t Democrat-run swing states follow the Sunshine State’s lead? The answer, sadly, is obvious: Because it would limit their options. Because it would mean that they’d have to run honest elections.

Michigan, of course, is one of the three “blue wall” states, along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, that Donald Trump broke through in 2016. But Trump narrowly lost those three states in 2020 amid a cloud of election night vote-counting controversy, especially in Detroit. As former Trump White House senior advisor Peter Navarro wrote in his 2021 book In Trump Time:

In Michigan — arguably the “first among equals” in the battleground states when it comes to abusing Republican observers — election officials in Democrat strongholds such as Detroit covered the windows of rooms where ballots were being processed and counted so as to block the view from the outside. In Pennsylvania, similar observer abuses ran rampant as tens of thousands of ballots were processed in back rooms.

It appears that things are proceeding apace this election year. As The Federalist’s Logan Washburn reports: “More than 40 percent of absentee ballots sent to voters in Detroit have already been returned, sparking concerns about Democrat ballot harvesting among people who remember the suspicious events that plagued the city in 2020. But the data also indicates the return rate spike might have more to do with a decrease in ballots being requested, rather than a significant increase in ballots being returned this early.”

Who knows? But all this paints an ominous picture, and it becomes even more so when we consider that all three of those blue wall states are controlled by Democrats. Certainly, each state’s most populous urban centers — Detroit and Philadelphia and Milwaukee — are controlled by Democrats.

As Josef Stalin once said, perhaps apocryphally, “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

Let’s hope that Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley has a plan for ensuring that history doesn’t repeat itself in two weeks.