The GOP’s election lies have already begun. Their actions give them away.

The last decade has made clear that you’re going to hear a lot of lies from Donald Trump and the Republicans about the results of this year’s midterm elections over the next few days and weeks. They will claim they won the most votes in elections they clearly lost. They will lie the Americans who voted against them did so fraudulently. In places in which they control the mechanics of elections, they might even go beyond mere verbal lies and attempt to alter the underlying vote counts. This is a fundamentally fascist party that holds democracy itself in contempt; a thuggish minority faction that attempted to overthrow an election through force in a violent insurrection at the United States capital. There is no lie they will not tell in order to cling to power – and to sooth their own broken egos in the wake of what is shaping up to be an electoral rebuke of historic proportions.

You should know that they are lying, first and foremost, because lying is what they do. There is ample precedent. Their claims cannot be taken at face value; if anything, Donald Trump and his party asserting something should be reason to believe the opposite.

But there is another sure sign Republicans don’t believe their own election lies this year, and that sign is literally everything they have been doing for the past month.

See, the lies Trump and the Republicans will tell are all based on the same premise: That most Americans favored them, not Democrats, in this year’s elections. Now, ask yourself: Are Republicans acting like they think that is true?

Axios reported recently that “Senate Republicans are weighing three last-ditch spending moves that would have been unimaginable six months ago: a cash infusion for Mississippi and even more money for South Carolina and Kansas.”

These are not places Republicans spend money late unless they know the electorate has turned strongly against them.

The last Democrat to win a Senate race in Kansas was born in 1879. He lost his re-election campaign in 1932, and Kansas hasn’t sent a Democrat to the United States Senate since. It has been twenty years since a Democrat came with 10 points of winning a Senate race in South Carolina. Explaining his decision to campaign in Mississippi in the final days of the election, Trump said the incumbent Republican Senator is “doing great, but I just got to make sure ... “I can’t take a chance. I can't take a chance. She's got no problem.” Mississippi is not a state in which Republicans have to devote their time and money to “making sure” in anything but a disastrous electoral environment: The last Democrat to win a Senate race in Mississippi was born in 1901. He’s been dead for 31 years, and out of the Senate for 37. Republicans have won the last fifteen regular Senate elections in Mississippi by an average of 65-34.

This comes just a few weeks after Republicans scrambled to find money for tough Senate races in Alaska and Iowa. A Democrat has won a Senate race in Alaska exactly once in the half-century I have been alive.

Elon Musk has personally spent half a billion dollars trying to save Republicans from the wrath of their constituents, much of it in dark red states: Musk has spent at least $168 million on the Texas race alone. Texas!

JD Vance is heading to upstate New York to try to save Anthony Constantino, the Trump superfan and floundering Republican nominee in a district Donald Trump won by 21 points just two years ago. Constantino is a deeply ridiculous candidate even by the standards of the Trump GOP: When asked recently what is the largest city in the district he is running to represent, Constantino answered “I don’t know, ask Grok,” referring to Elon Musk’s infamously racist and frequently wrong AI chatbot:

Still, even the dimmest of Republican bulbs should be able to win a Trump+21 district without emergency assistance from the Vice President of the United States.

Trump has planned an election eve rally for the Republican candidate in the Louisiana senate race, just two years after Trump won the state by 22 points. I could go on (and on, and on): Donald Trump and the Republicans are throwing massive amounts of cash and planning last-ditch campaign rallies in the darkest red states and districts in America.

This is not the behavior of a political party that believes it has the support of the American people. This is the behavior of a political party that is scared shitless. A political party that knows it is held in contempt by the American people after it started an illegal war it cannot finish that has driven up prices, disappeared people off the streets and sending them without trial to foreign torture prisons, murdered Americans for daring to speak out against these abuses, plundered the treasury for personal gain, and given unaccountable billionaire maniacs carte blanche to destroy crucial government infrastructure.

This is a political party that knows the American people have turned against it:

“The numbers are somewhere between shitabulous and craptastic,” a top Republican advising several federal races across the country told Axios. “It looks worse than 2018 now. Trump is heading to Bush 2006 levels.”

When Trump and the Republicans start telling you they are the real winners of this years’s elections, remember their actions have already given them away.

The outcome of this week’s elections is not a foregone conclusion, and several key senate races in particular could go either way. But the desperation Trump and the GOP have shown about their prospects in races that should be sure things for them make clear that they understand the American people have turned against them, even in deep red states and districts. That desperation undermines the certainty Republicans are likely to express this week that they are the actual victors.