• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    that was legitimately a contested election by the numbers

    Not according to the incoming Republican administration. There are still conservatives who flog that election to prove how little Democrats care about democracy.

    I’m not sure I get the comparison here.

    If Gore had squeaked out a win even in the face of abundant ratfvckery in Florida and Ohio, Republicans would have insisted the election was a fraud in the same way they insisted Clinton stole the election in 1992 and Carter in 1976 and Kennedy stole it in 1960.

    Because this is a partisan issue, there’s no real clean line between legitimate victory and election theft from the perspective of the partisans themselves. And because both sides routinely fight dirty (Nixon was as aggressive fucking democrats in southern Illinois as Kennedy was in fucking Republicans in Chicago), it is often difficult to talk about a clean race when the reality is more often that one person or the other lost in a dirty knife fight.