I think he thinks he'll lose, and he thinks a big loss is actually less believable to his supporters than a close loss, so he's trying to create a big loss, which will make more of his supporters Jan 6 2.0.
I'm not following that logic. If he tells everyone not to vote, and most comply meaning only a few vote, wouldn't the majority of them who didn't vote see the low results and understand that it would be the natural outcome? Where do they think votes come from if they don't vote?
I imagine when they look at the lines of voters they categorize people into two bins: normal and not-normal. Trump is asking his supporters to do a Rorschach test but citizens are the ink blots and he's specifically telling them to look for scary things. Their Conclusion: If you see lots of normal people and he loses the election, then it's because of those voters that didn't look normal were there to rig the system.