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My point, then, is that the specific conservative hysteria over 2020 was because Donald Trump specifically couldn’t accept that he lost (whatever the ‘rules of the game’), not because historically unprecedented corruption occurred. This is the country of Tammany Hall, of Chicago machine politics, of comical gerrymandering, in that context 2020 just doesn’t feel special.
We accept that election-rigging happens, now we're just debating the specifics.
It is more difficult to change an election at a national level than at a local level, and not every election is "rigged". But it's not unprecedented to speculate about rigged presidential resulrs: 1960, 2000. It's a well-documented historical fact that LBJ manufactured tens of thousands of votes in his 1948 Senate election. Tammany Hall and the Chicago machine, as you suggest, are known. So it is possible!
A brief: election rules were changed in many states for the pandemic in 2020 which made it easier to generate mass quantities of mail-in ballots. On election night, when Trump was ahead across several swing states, and had already won presumed-bellweathers Ohio and Florida, vote counting stopped. Suddenly, when counting resumed, Trump was irrevocably behind. Mail-in ballots comprised the difference. Attempts to segregate or eliminate these ballots were regarded as an unjustified conspiracy theory, even though to this day chain of custody basically does not exist for any of them. If you had all the ballots in front of you and wanted to attempt a recount, you could not prove that every ballot actually came from a legitimate registered voter.
At this point, it's fine if you just don't want to believe anything, I can't make you believe in my priors. But making everything about how you think Donald Trump has a thin ego isn't really much of an argument. (It's not as though the other politicians of DC are known for their thick skins.)
We accept that dirty behavior (which may be described as ‘rigging’ if you prefer, although I would limit the use of that term to Anschluss-referendum-type ballot stuffing / just making up numbers) is a perennial feature of US elections and that there was nothing special or unique about 2020, then?
That is the key claim. No democracy is free of corruption or dirty electoral behavior of the type we’re discussing. So ‘2020 was rigged’ proponents face a simple choice - either they accept and argue that every US election ever has been ‘rigged’ by their standards and America is not and has never been a democracy OR they admit that what happens to Trump in 2020 was nothing out of the ordinary and he should accept that he got played and stop whining about what happened to everyone else happening to him.
Which is it? Trump’s thin skin is relevant because it stops him doing what almost every other victim of dirty behavior in US electoral history ultimately did, which is take the L.
Sure, that sounds reasonable.
This is silly catastrophizing. That crooked behavior exists in every election doesn't mean I need treat all elections as equally crooked. There are clear and obvious theories for what made 2020 especially dirty: the mass expansion of unverifiable mail-in ballots! The simultaneous count stop in several swing states! These are elements unique to the 2020 election. Being suspicious of them does not require me to declare that every election must have been stolen, or to commit to some silly prediction about crooked behavior in the future.
If you imagine that Trump could have had it rigged against it and should have conceded anyways, I find this silly again.
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This is a false binary. One can accept that attempts to attack electoral integrity are common and also think that 2020 was an unusually compromised election that was compromised by a series of deliberate policy choices. It wasn't the first severely compromised election and wasn't the worst (see Illinois in 1982 for a truly absurd display of how bad a sufficiently corrupt set of officials can encourage), but it was actually very bad anyway.
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