In 1935, Billy Rose’s Jumbo—a Broadway musical too big to fit into any Broadway theater—opened in New York’s Hippodrome, an oversized theater-arena some blocks from the Great White Way. It featured singers, dancers, comics, animals, and the world’s most perfunctory plot.

At one point, that plot had the brilliant comic Jimmy Durante sneaking an elephant—yes, a real, full-sized adult elephant—across the stage. When accosted mid-stage by a bad guy who asked him, "Where are you going with that elephant?" Durante replied, "What elephant?"

I was reminded of this Great Moment in Theater History by the Republican reaction—perhaps I should say pre-action—to Gavin Newsom’s landslide victory in California’s recall election. In the weeks leading up to Election Day, a host of Republicans, from Donald Trump to Larry Elder to anti-vaccine nutcases, said the only way Newsom could survive the recall was if the vote was rigged, and they went on to accuse the Democrats of doing exactly that.

The full vote isn’t counted yet, but it’s clear Newsom has won by at least a 60-40 margin. A margin so big—so, if you will, elephantine—that for Republicans to keep on making their claims of fraud would require them to stand center stage before a watching world, plaintively asking, "What elephant?"

That was a course that Elder—who for decades has been willing to look ridiculous in his quest for deranged radio listeners and more recently for voters, but not that ridiculous—decided not to take. Newsom’s margin was so large that Elder actually conceded and took down the pre-election allegations of fraud from his websites and Facebook pages.

Despite this after-the-fact acknowledgment of reality, Republicans across the land are making preemptive accusations of Democratic vote-rigging. Virginia Republicans are alleging that if Democrat Terry McAuliffe wins November’s gubernatorial election, it will be due to vote-manipulating chicanery. In Nevada, Republican Adam Laxalt, who plans to challenge Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in the November 2022 midterm election—14 months from now—says he’s engaged attorneys to ferret out the fraud should he lose.

In the complete absence of evidence of any such fraud in the 2020 or any other recent election, much less in elections that have yet to take place, all such allegations require the accuser to deny the existence of the elephant—that is, of empirical reality. The Durante character wasn’t delusional or mendacious; he was just caught. Would the same could be said of today’s Republicans.