Brace yourselves, anxious Democrats: things could look very ugly as vote-counting begins on Election Day.

With scarcely two months left before Nov. 3, a respected Democratic data-analytics firm tells Axios that “it’s highly likely that President Trump will appear to have won — potentially in a landslide — on election night, even if he ultimately loses when all the votes are counted.”

Why might this happen? Because many more Democrats than Republicans are likely to vote by mail — just as the Biden campaign has been encouraging them to do, because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

That means the Biden vote-count will lag well behind Trump’s, not just by hours, but by days, maybe even weeks. So Trump “could hold big electoral college and popular vote leads on election night,” Axios says.

But look at a map showing how the results could change over six days:

This is the projection of the data company Hawkfish, which is funded by Michael Bloomberg; it works primarily for the the Democratic National Committee and for pro-Biden super PACs.

The company’s CEO, Josh Mendelsohn, calls the scenario a “red mirage.”

“We are sounding an alarm and saying that this is a very real possibility, that the data is going to show on election night an incredible victory for Donald Trump,” Mendelsohn told Axios in an exclusive interview.

“When every legitimate vote is tallied and we get to that final day, which will be some day after Election Day, it will in fact show that what happened on election night was exactly that, a mirage,” Mendelsohn said. “It looked like Donald Trump was in the lead and he fundamentally was not when every ballot gets counted.”

But think about what’s likely to happen if the Hawkfish projection plays out over nearly a week:

As the election results slowly turn from a Trump victory to a defeat, the enraged president almost certainly would turn to Twitter and declare it “THE GREATEST FRAUD IN HISTORY.”

“The group is also trying to sensitize state and county elections officials, news and social media organizations, and the courts to the perils of premature results — and to the possibility of Trump and his team applying challenges and political pressure to reject a high share of mailed-in ballots counted after election day.”

Watch the Axios/HBO segment above.