By ALI SWENSON

WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump and his Republican allies have spent months sowing doubt about the integrity of America’s voting systems and priming the supporters expect a 2024 election full of massive and inevitable fraud.

The former president continued to lay these foundations even during a majority smooth voting day Tuesday, making unsubstantiated claims about Philadelphia and Detroit and highlighting concerns about election operations in Milwaukee. Shortly before the polls began to close, he took to his social media platform to announce, without providing details, “There’s a lot of talk about massive fraud in Philadelphia.” The statement drew immediate denials from city leaders, who said there was no evidence of any wrongdoing.

However, Trump’s gloomy warnings came to an abrupt end in the final hours of the evening as early returns began to tilt in his favor. During his time election night speechthe president-elect touted a “magnificent victory” while claiming ownership of the favorable results and expressing his love for the same states he had questioned hours earlier.

The messaging pivot was part of it a Trump playing card which many of his party adopted: To preventive defy a loss with claims of widespread fraud but be ready to quickly ignore them in the event of a win.

In 2020, when he lost to Joe BidenTrump carried out the other part of that strategy — doubling down over the next four years the false notion that the election was stolen, trying to convince supporters that he was the rightful winner. The campaign was successful in changing minds: the polls show it more than half of Republicans i still think biden was not legitimately elected in 2020.

In the weeks and months leading up to Tuesday’s election, many Trump supporters held up alleged evidence of fraud that they abandoned when it became clear that Trump was ahead.

Several congressional Republicans also fought to require it proof of citizenship for voter registration and argued that the election could not be fair without that extra level of security. However, the legislation’s biggest backers congratulated Trump overnight, without repeating those concerns.

It’s become a common trope to see candidates focus only on claims of potential fraud if they’ve lost or think they’ll lose, said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department attorney who is executive director of the Center for Innovation and Research Electoral.

“I think it’s kind of telling that we’ve seen fewer claims of fraud following the election that former president and incoming president Trump won,” Becker said Wednesday.

The strategy sets a problematic precedent that “if your favorite candidate doesn’t win, it must mean the whole system is illegitimate,” said Leah Wright Rigueur, professor of history at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

As Republicans have often pointed out, it wasn’t just their party that refused to accept the races they lost. They often point to the example of Democratic activist and former Georgia state representative Stacey Abrams, who ended her 2018 gubernatorial campaign without explicitly conceding defeat to her Republican opponent, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.

However, Trump is the only US president who has taken action to try to overturn the results of an election that he categorically lost. The role he played in violent January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, after urging his supporters to “fight like hell,” he was condemned by democracy advocates of both political parties.