US election 2016: What happens if Donald Trump loses on 8 November?

"If we don't win this election, I don't know what I'm going to do," Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump told supporters at a Florida rally this week.

The businessman is down in the polls following the release of a video in which he made lewd comments of women and the claims this week that he sexually harassed several.

However, that doesn't mean the former reality TV star has no plans if he loses on 8 November.

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What is Trump likely to do?

Journalism could be calling. The Independent's David Usborne says Trump could leverage the anti-establishment support he has won during his campaign to launch a new conservative media empire if he loses. He could possibly team up with Stephen Bannon, his campaign chief and the former executive chairman of the right-wing Breitbart news and opinion website.

What about his supporters?

The Atlantic website has identified four features of Trump's core constituency: its members did not go to college; they believe they lack a political voice; they want to wage an "interior war" against those they deem outsiders, and they live in parts of the US with racial resentment.

Ben Domenech, the founder of The Federalist blog, predicts Trumpists who actually belong to the GOP will abandon it "because they believe it was insufficiently pro-Trump".

Over at CNBC, Jake Novak says the businessman's supporters will never forgive Republican leaders and the news media.

And the Republican Party?

Donald Trump has divided the party like no other politician in recent history. Several Republicans fear that if Hillary Clinton triumphs, their party could be, in the worlds of Sahil Kapur of Bloomberg Politics, "on the cusp of a cataclysmic fracture".

Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Mitt Romney's failed presidential bid in 2012, says: "I think there's a Trump party and there's a Republican Party. I have a lot of problems squaring the two."

Forging unity could be impossible "if hordes of Trump voters blame party leaders for the defeat of a man who electrified the grass roots supporters in a way no other Republican has managed in decades", writes Stephen Collinson for CNN.

Blogger Domenech disagrees, saying the reality is that nothing will change. Elected Republicans will blame right-wingers and work to preserve their own levers of power, while activists "will blame elected Republicans and party leadership". Trump-backers, meanwhile, will condemn those opposed him and blame the party for not supporting him.

What will happen to Congress?

One consequence of a big loss by Trump is that it could wipe out the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. The possibility of a Clinton presidency and a Democratic Congress is remote, but it would have a huge impact on industries such as finance, pharmaceuticals and energy - not to mention high-income taxpayers, says the Wall Street Journal.