When Terry McAuliffe became chairman of the DNC, he said that "Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, Jim Baker, and the Supreme Court ... tampered with the results" of the 2000 election. At the 2004 DNC Convention, he said that Republicans "stole" the 2000 election: https://twitter.com/TeamYoungkin/status/1442488094301822980.
Comparably prominent figures on the Republican side were not saying similar things about Clinton or Obama. Unlike Hilary Clinton said about Trump, McCain and Romney never said Obama was an "illegitimate" President.
> What was notable, of course, about Trump's rigging claims is that they were accompanied by an actual effort to overturn the election, something that has no precedent. That wasn't the "elites"; that was an outsider effort.
Sure. Trump is worse than anything Democrats did from 2000-2018. Certainly individually, possibly in the aggregate.
> Election denialism clearly isn't a reaction to a rejection of institutional norms by elites, unless we're talking about elites during the time of Tilden.
Trump's ability to deny the legitimacy of the election and maintain the support of the same voters who nominated Mittens is absolutely a reaction to elites rejecting institutional norms. For two decades, CNN sanctioned Democrats' election lies instead of condemning them.
Then came 2016, when Democrat-voting federal employees declared war on Trump--the duly elected President--through the "Resistance." If you wanted to convince the American public that the "deep state" exists and that the rules have already been thrown out the window--to make it trivial to draw comparisons between DC and the Capitol from "The Hunger Games"--you could not have picked a better way to do it.
Again: that case is that there is nothing new about claims that elections were stolen, but that there is clearly something new about a President literally attempting (in more than one way) to rig an election after losing.
As it happens, I agree with you (or at least, the professors who taught you this at Northwestern) about the 2000 election --- that is, that it was correctly decided. But not only did Terry McAuliffe believe 2000 was wrongly decided, so did almost half the Supreme Court. And despite all that, there was a peaceful transfer of power, and not a whisper from the Democratic party that any of the institutions of government be bent or subverted to "correct" the result.
You haven't provided any evidence to connect obstinate federal employees to Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and so I don't think I need to address that point. I don't agree with you about those obstinate employees (obstinate employees brought Nixon down, after all), but that doesn't matter.
The idea that the Democrats are somehow responsible for Trump's effort to literally rig the 2020 election is a strange hill to die on. I don't think many reasonable people would be sympathetic to the argument.
The history of allegations of vote rigging goes back to the 19th century; there were loud, public allegations regarding at least Kennedy, Clinton, Bush, and Obama before Trump. What was notable, of course, about Trump's rigging claims is that they were accompanied by an actual effort to overturn the election, something that has no precedent. That wasn't the "elites"; that was an outsider effort.
Election denialism clearly isn't a reaction to a rejection of institutional norms by elites, unless we're talking about elites during the time of Tilden.
I might agree with you about the filibuster, the Tea Party (bad, but not batshit), and the refusal to confirm Garland. But that doesn't help your argument, which is I think fatally broken.