It was the simplest of observations, but it has the Democrats reaching for the Maalox: “Without Pennsylvania, Biden becomes an underdog.”

This utterance wasn’t the wishful thinking of a never-say-die Republican pollster. Rather, it was FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver yesterday on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos. Silver is the number cruncher that the Left runs to for reassurance, but he blew it big time in 2016, along with all the other “experts.” And suffice it to say, his confidence in an easy electoral victory for Joe Biden has been leaking steadily over the past week. How so? Here’s what he said last Monday: “If the polls aren’t tightening since the debate — and with 62 million people having voted — we’re sort of getting to the point where the only way Trump can win is with a major polling error, bigger than in 2016 (or if the election is stolen somehow).”

It almost sounds as if Silver is bracing his fellow Democrats for another shocking loss, either because the pollsters whose work he aggregates are inept, or because Donald Trump will have “stolen” it. We should note that this latter scenario is a despicable bit of projection on Silver’s behalf, because history shows that when it comes to stealing elections, the Democrats are (literally) the ones to watch.

Anyone who doesn’t think voter fraud is a very real threat from the Left hasn’t read John Fund’s reporting on Minnesota’s infamous “Felons for Franken” Senate race in 2008. There, a narrow victory for Republican incumbent Norm Coleman was overturned with the help of more than 1,000 felons who voted illegally — in favor of comedian Al Franken, who became the Democrats’ filibuster-proof 60th vote for ObamaCare.

As long as Democrats control the big-city machines in our nation’s battleground states, the potential for voter fraud exists. Think Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Atlanta. But above all those, think Philadelphia.

And this year, with the unprecedented introduction of tens of millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots at the behest of Democrats, the potential for fraud is equally unprecedented. It’s fascinating, too, to see how Democrats who today deride Republicans for so much as raising the question of fraud were themselves concerned about it just a few years ago.

Take Barack Obama, for example, who in 2008 said, “They’re talking about people mailing in their ballots. Do you trust the security, the honesty of such an election process?”

Or take the bipartisan 2005 report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III, which concluded, “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

Again, Pennsylvania is ground zero. As The Wall Street Journal reports, “Pennsylvania voters have requested a record number of more than 3 million absentee ballots this year. The state chapter of Common Cause, a left-leaning voting-rights advocacy group, has assigned 2,000 volunteers to voting sites in 11 counties that the group believes could have election-day problems. … In recent weeks, a lawsuit filed by Pennsylvania Republicans reached the U.S. Supreme Court. A 4-4 order let stand a state Supreme Court decision allowing officials to count mail-in ballots received up to three days after Election Day.”

Time was when we knew on that first Tuesday night in November just who our next president would be. This, though, is 2020, and the fate of our Republic might be in the hands of the lawyers.