The reason that it is important to ask Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) whether he accepts that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election is not to establish whether Vance accepts reality. At least, that’s not the primary reason. It is good to know, certainly, whether the guy who could be a 78-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency in four months is capable of admitting uncomfortable truths.

Instead, the primary reason to ask Vance that question is to determine whether he will accept it if Trump loses the 2024 election. And based on Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, it seems fair to assume that he will once again fall in line behind Trump — the former president who, at another point on Tuesday, made clear that he sees no urgency in declaring his acceptance of the process.

Trump took several questions from reporters as part of an event in Milwaukee shortly before the debate began. At one point, he raised his purported questions about the last election and his concerns about the upcoming one.

“All I want is a fair election,” he said. “That’s all. Just a fair, honest election. I hope we’re going to get that.”

“Do you trust the process this time around?” a reporter asked.

“I’ll let you know in about, uh, 33 days,” Trump replied.

In other words, his trust in the electoral process necessarily depends on the outcome.

As CNN’s Daniel Dale delineated, Trump has elevated a number of claims in recent weeks that seem to be aimed at undermining confidence in the results. He’s claimed that voting by noncitizens is a rampant problem, which it isn’t. He’s argued that Democrats are using overseas voting to commit fraud, which is false (as new research from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public explains). He argued that support for Vice President Kamala Harris is inflated, a way for him to later suggest that her vote totals are necessary artificial.

In short, he’s injecting skepticism about the results well in advance of Election Day, just as he did in 2020, so that he retains the ability to inject doubt about the outcome. Just as he did in 2020.

His allies are lining up to bolster that effort. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), a central figure in Trump’s effort to subvert the 2020 results, was asked last week if he committed to ensuring that the electoral-vote results would be tallied without incident even if Harris won.

“Well, of course,” Johnson replied — before adding an important caveat: “if we have a free, fair and safe election, we’re going to follow the Constitution.”

In 2020, America had a free, fair and safe election, one that has grown only more obviously so as Trump and his allies have attempted to find weak points that might bolster his claims of fraud. But it is a central argument in Trumpworld that this didn’t happen — or, at least, that it is necessary to insist that it didn’t.

Corey Lewandowski, a longtime Trump adviser who recently joined the 2024 effort, demonstrated how this works in an interview on CNN Wednesday morning.

“Why is this so difficult for the Trump campaign to answer?” CNN’s Jim Acosta asked. “I mean, it’s 2024. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”

Lewandowski didn’t answer, instead saying that voters were “focused on an election which is just under five weeks away.”

“We can go back and re-litigate the 2020 election,” he added, “or we can look at what we can do to make America better for the everyday Americans who are struggling under Bidenomics.”

Acosta pressed him on it, noting that Trump was “teeing up the same kinds of challenges after this election.”

“Jim, we know there was fraud,” Lewandowski replied, referring to the contest four years ago. “There’s no question there was some fraud that took place in the 2020 election. There’s no question about that.”

Acosta replied that there was no “widespread” fraud, prompting Lewandowski to ask what he meant by “widespread.”

That’s worth an answer. The lack of “widespread” fraud means that while, yes, there were isolated examples of people casting illegal ballots (including, multiple times, for Trump), there’s no evidence that any systemic fraud occurred or even that any fraud occurred which might constitute any non-miniscule portion of the votes cast in a jurisdiction. Think of it like lightning strikes: yes, people sometimes get hit by lightning. Daily life, however, is not affected by this occurring.

But Lewandowski can’t say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fairly, both because he is a Trump loyalist who understands that Trump doesn’t want people to say this and because he knows that Trump wants to keep the door open to making similar claims this time around.

It wasn’t the debate moderators who asked Vance about the 2020 outcome, by the way. Instead it was Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D). He asked Vance if he acknowledged Trump’s loss in 2020, with Vance sidestepping the question. Walz described this as a “damning non-answer,” which isn’t inaccurate.

What’s more, Vance also attempted to rationalize Trump’s actions after his 2020 loss. He trotted out a tired bit of whataboutism suggesting that Democrats had engaged in similar election denialism. (Lewandowski did this, too.) But he also downplayed what Trump did to a truly striking degree.

“What President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020,” he claimed, ‘and my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square, and that’s all I’ve said and that’s all that Donald Trump has said.”

“There were problems” is very much not “all that Donald Trump has said.” But even if it had been, there’s never been any evidence that there were problems in the first place.

Vance also shrugged that the effects of Trump’s denialism, saying that you couldn’t argue that Trump was a threat to democracy when “he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th as we have done for 250 years in this country.” How can you say that the streaker disrupted the game when he left the field of his own volition?

In the end, though, Vance did make a commitment on the subject.

“If we want to say that we need to respect the results of the election, I’m on board,” Vance said.

Sure. At least until Election Day.