What fascinates me about the last two elections is the perfect symmetry.

After the 2020 election, millions of Republicans were convinced the system had been manipulated. The arguments focused on mail-in ballots, counting procedures, and suspicious activity in places like Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. For those voters, Joe Biden wasn’t just a political opponent. He was an illegitimate president.

Fast-forward to 2024 and now you can watch the mirror image forming on the other side. Suddenly you see arguments that Elon Musk’s influence on X, his political spending, algorithms, or vague “irregularities” must explain Trump’s victory. Threads circulate suggesting something about the numbers feels off, that turnout patterns are strange, or that the result can’t possibly be legitimate. The implication becomes exactly the same one we heard four years earlier.

“Our side couldn’t have lost fairly.”

The cast changes. The argument doesn’t. Which means we now have a strange new political tradition in America: whichever side loses concludes the election must have been rigged.

Republicans say Biden is illegitimate.

Democrats say Trump is illegitimate.

And honestly, there’s a weird logic to it.

If an election is truly competitive, the losing side should feel like they got absolutely crushed by the result. Nobody walks out of a real fight saying, “Well that felt totally fair and satisfying.” They walk out furious, convinced something must have gone wrong.

In that sense, the fact that both sides keep reacting this way might actually be evidence that the system is doing exactly what competitive systems do: producing clear winners and very unhappy losers.

When one side wins and the other side feels robbed, you have politics.

When both sides, at different times, feel robbed… you probably have democracy.

From a purely observational standpoint, it’s almost elegant.

Two elections. Two presidents. Two completely different tribes insisting the other one couldn’t possibly have won legitimately.

American politics has somehow achieved bipartisan election denial.