News that President Trump is gearing up to scrutinize the results of the midterms at Philadelphia suggests he’s learned a lesson from the 2020 election. The legal campaign he appears to be mounting, according to a report in Rolling Stone, looks to be on a par with what the Democrats did in advance of the vote in 2020. That’s when the left moved in the courts and the press to protect a win, warning against an election-night “red mirage.”

That, at least, was the term used by Josh Mendelsohn, of a Bloomberg-backed data company, Hawkfish, in comments before the voting in 2020. As Mr. Mendelsohn saw it, “it’s highly likely that President Trump will appear to have won — potentially in a landslide — on election night.” Yet that would be an illusion, Mr. Mendelsohn warned, calling it a “red mirage,” because he foresaw that Mr. Trump “ultimately loses when all the votes are counted.” 

Mr. Mendelsohn, and other Democrats, based this theory on the idea that most voters on the right would vote in person on election day, while many on the left would have mailed in their ballots due to Covid fears. Yet the tenor of the remarks gave them the air of a confident prediction, as opposed to a hypothetical possibility. In its report on Mr. Mendelsohn’s comments, Axios described it as a “a very real, if not foreordained, outcome.”

Prognostications like Mr. Mendelsohn’s were made, at least in part, because of changes in voting laws in swing states that had expanded the use of mail-in ballots and loosened policies for counting them. The Quaker State, for one, had changed its voting rules to allow late mail-in ballots. Pennsylvania’s rule change, decreed by the state’s top court, was challenged by the GOP all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to intervene. 

At the time, we hailed the dissenting Justice Samuel Alito as a prophet for warning that ignoring this matter “could lead to serious post-election problems.” His prior work as a jurist in and around Philadelphia could have explained, we wrote, why he alone seemed “to grasp the possibility of malfeasance in the swamp of Pennsylvania.” It’s not our intention here to dispute the outcome of the 2020 election, only to mark the dangers in 2022 or 2024.

Rolling Stone describes Mr. Trump as “gripped by the belief that he got cheated in Philadelphia in 2020.” The former president fears it’s “going to happen again in 2022,” an ex-Trump White House official, Michael Caputo, is quoted by Rolling Stone as saying. Mr. Trump sees the Oz-Fetterman fray as a “dress rehearsal for Trump 2024” and is urging allies to “concentrate” additional legal resources” at Philadelphia, Rolling Stone reports.

In response, Mr. Caputo says, “I’m advising Republicans to recruit and train election observers and a team of attorneys to oversee historically problematic precincts,” Rolling Stone reports. It’s an effort reminiscent of how Democrats geared up in advance to win the 2020 election — at the ballot box if possible and, if that’s in doubt, in the courts. That was the subtext of articles like the Atlantic’s headlined “The Election That Could Break America.”

“If the vote is close,” the Atlantic warned, “Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?” The article, published weeks before the 2020 election, depicted “a cohort of close observers of our presidential elections,” including “scholars and lawyers and political strategists.” These sages feared that Mr. Trump would refuse to accept the defeat they viewed as a foregone conclusion.

Mr. Trump’s behavior, the magazine said, left “no room to suppose that he will accept the public’s verdict if the vote is going against him.” It went on to say that we have “no precedent or procedure to end this election if Biden seems to carry the Electoral College but Trump refuses to concede. We will have to invent one.” No wonder Mr. Trump is looking to have a legal team in place to guard, in 2022 and 2024, against a blue mirage.