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Okay; explain to me why left-wing protesters can't simply have George Floyd level riots and burn DC, NYC and every other major US city to the ground in response to Trump's election? You believe that sympathetic AGs in all of those very blue districts will fail to prosecute them, correct? What harm will come to stochastic terrorists, when I've been assured that it's very easy to do this kind of damage to infrastructure and hard to track the perpetrators? As far as I'm aware, no public health official has suffered legal other major professional consequences, so what harms did they personally suffer to make them stop pushing lockdowns and vaccines?
Perhaps I'll add, why didn't democrats rig the 2024 election given that nobody suffered consequences for rigging the election in 2020?
When you say 'without too much harm to themselves,' you've essentially watered your argument down to democracy/populism, given that most of your proposed consequences come from the ballot box. Or at least given yourself enough of a loophole to drive a George Floyd-style riot through. At which point, if my model of the world is that elected officials largely try to do things that are popular with the electorate (at least when those actions are legible to the public), and that a majority of Americans aren't particularly motivated by harming the outgroup, please give me concrete examples where our predictions about the world would differ?
Imagine you put a puppet in as president, knowing that he was controllable due to ill health and that your control of mass media could hide and lie about any visible instances of his declining health, which doctors assured you was bad, but currently easy to hide. Imagine that due to circumstances outside your control his condition deteriorates faster than you expect and can manage, such that after a disastrous debate performance (perhaps sabotaged by an alternative faction in your party) power players in your organisation begin publicly demanding he step down. If he steps down however, you will have to return a bunch of money you've already spent and start a brand new presidential campaign 100 days out from the election. Due to your financial situation and because all of the highly ambitious possible alternatives refuse, you have to run a person nobody thinks can win.
Wouldn't you cede that election and put your effort in preparing for the next one? You still have to campaign as hard as possible for the people downticket, but you aren't going to pull out all the tricks to win the presidency. Especially not when your opponents are watching like hawks.
Note in this hypothetical you are the party leaders, I don't mean to imply anything about the average democrat supporter, who I believe aren't especially motivated by harming the outgroup.
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Because the people who were organizing them stopped when the post riot life started harming democratic candidates! In other words they were getting into too much trouble so they stopped that particular harm effort.
What is the evidence of this? People here and elsewhere argued that Floyd was a boon for democrats in 2020, and they won fairly convincingly four months later.
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Because Floyd-level riots hurt Democratic-run and Democratic-voting areas (you yourself mention NYC--not a Republican stronghold!) and discredit the Democrats. They have some propaganda value against the right, especially when the media is sympathetic, but they probably hurt the left more than the right. This doesn't depend on prosecutions.
Because their ability to rig elections is not unlimited and they couldn't rig it by enough to push the election to the Democrats.
"They'll allow as many Floyd-style protests as they can get away with, but they will eventually stop" is very different than preventing Floyd-style protests as much as they can. You would predict the latter. Certainly you wouldn't predict prosecutors going easy on protestors.
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