“Potential to last longer…”!! Ha. You just proved my point. We Democrats aren’t stung by the defeat of Nov. 2016, as if it were a discrete event. We’re sad because of the harmful-to-others policies that are being implemented over a four-year period, which we’re only in the middle of right now.
Runyon’s Law in effect.
No, it used to be about philosophies. But modern Republicans have rejected the concept of philosophies. Now, it’s all just pure tribalism. You’ve got Republicans saying things like “It doesn’t matter that Trump is the living embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins; he was sent by God, therefore, if you don’t worship him, you’re not a real Christian”.
Tribalism is fine when it’s just about who you want to win a football game. But the fate of our country isn’t a football game.
Not equivalent. Worse. The fact that so many Americans were willing to vote for someone as disgusting as Trump is a greater tragedy to the nation then 9/11, an earthquake or a school shooting. Obviously those things are worse for the people involved, but for the nation, Trump is significantly worse.
You can’t use the 2016 election to try to understand trends or “how people react.” You can talk about 2000, 2004, or 2008 if you want to discuss. But 2016 was not normal.
Clearly, the GOPers take way worse offense to losing. I mean, they’re paying an extra 7 cents per year to educate kids who will probably drop out! From a bad neighborhood too! 
Seriously, if they’re not the most offended, why elect a person with no clue about business or government but is supported by people like phony evangelicals and people like David Duke?
You think the jury is still out on this one?
Yes. Dems also suffer under the delusion that this is about policy. Their pathologies are scarcely veiled.
A lot of democrats weren’t as much upset that we lost, as much as they were upset that Trump won. Trump winning made a lot of us feel that huge numbers of Americans are far more stupid, irresponsible and cruel that we realized.
Had Kasich or Romney won the presidency in 2016, the left wouldn’t have responded nearly as badly.
Also the gop controlled the executive as well as both branches of congress. Had Trump won the presidency but the democrats held one house of congress in 2016, the meltdown wouldn’t have been nearly as bad.
In my experience, both sides feel there will be a lot of suffering If the other side wins, but at least the democratic fears are more grounded in reality.
The right is afraid of fema camps, gun confiscation, economic collapse, uppity minorities, etc. None of that happens.
However the left is afraid of voter suppression, mistreatment of gays, non whites, immigrants, etc. Income inequality, assaults on health care, etc. Those things actually happen under the gop.
Nobody had their guns taken under Obama. Under Trump it is a very real fear that millions will lose their health care.
So in my experience, when the left is afraid it’s afraid of what the gop actually does. The gop is afraid of what they think the left wants to do.
Plus 2016 showed the electoral college is a long term structural failure. 2000 could have been a fluke but 2016 is a pattern.
The incredible psychic ability of WillFarnaby returns! Watch him diagnose mental illness in strangers from hundreds or even thousands of miles away, with nothing more than a computer screen!
If we use 1996 and 2004 as comparisons, Democrats reacted worse to Bush winning reelection in 2004 than Republicans did to Clinton winning reelection in 1996, IMHO.
He is a very long ways from being the only Doper that attempts this trick.
2016 represents 100 percent of our most recent election. You have to go far back into history to support a definition of *normal *that excludes it.
Even so, you can certainly find trends in that history that show the electorate changing to the point where 2016 could happen. *Idiocracy *was released back in 2006, just as a data point, after a generation of Fox and Clinton-bashing. Will Rogers and H.L. Mencken made careers earlier out of pointing and laughing at the stupid voters, while Father Coughlin was performing the same hate act on the radio Rush Limbaugh took over. We were already laughing at the stupidity of the electorate years before it suddenly stopped being so funny.
But this analysis doesn’t make sense as far as the *post-election reaction *of Republican voters goes - unless you’re arguing that, deep down, Republican voters know that Democratic victories are in fact good for them, and that therefore their support for the GOP and opposition to the Democratic Party is only feigned and that they deep down don’t really mind Democrats winning and in fact feel good about it. I have seen nothing on social media to suggest that Republicans deep down “know” that “Democrats are good for America.”
Probably did the equivalent: provided a few extra kegs. 
Been keeping up with the news lately? :dubious:
Even if its the new normal it is a poor measure for the point that the OP seems to be trying to make, namely that it is the psychological makeup of Democrats as a group take loss harder. To attribute the differential reaction solely to psychology ignores the degree of Trauma.
Even if Trump is the “New Normal” that doesn’t invalidate the point that he is objectively a more disruptive influence on the state of the nation and the world than any past candidate. Obama didn’t have members of his party and even his own administration complaining that whitehouse was in total chaos and being run by an idiot.
To repeat my analogy, even if year after year New England suffers less Hurricane damage year after year than do the southern states, it doesn’t mean that New England is more resilient than the south.
If Louis Farrakhan was elected president I suspect that many on the right would need time of from school and therapy sessions.
You keep making it sound like people only care about their ‘team’ winning. And calling it a ‘meltdown’ is the same kind of chickenshit people use to ignore or devalue legitimate grievances.
The reaction to Trump was uniquely vitriolic because Trump is a uniquely hideous human being. More importantly, the election of Trump proved that tens of millions of Americans are more hateful, racist, self-destructive, and ignorant than we ever dreamed. The only people who don’t seem to comprehend this are the Trumpists themselves, who insist that Trump has never done anything wrong to anyone ever.
If Democrats raged against Trump, it’s because TRUMP FUCKING DESERVES IT.
The Republicans had a harsh but comparatively restrained reaction to Obama because OBAMA WAS A GOOD FUCKING PRESIDENT. Even if you didn’t like his policies, you could at least comprehend that he was a sane, rational, contemplative person, and you could imagine that people voted for him for logical reasons. And SOMEHOW, that still didn’t stop Republicans from claiming TO THIS DAY that Obama is a secret Muslim atheist terrorist who wants impose Sharia law and take away our guns.
If I sound frustrated, it’s because I’m tired to trying to explain this concept to people who refuse to understand.
Dems literally organized a scream-at-the-sky. “Meltdown” is the perfect word to describe what’s happened to them.
It’s not about which side Republicans think is better for the country. It’s about the Republicans not caring what’s better for the country. When the Steelers win the Superbowl, I’m happy, but not because I think that it’s better for the nation for the Steelers to be the NFL champions, but just because they’re the team I root for. And that’s the attitude that most Republicans take towards politics.
Rhetorical flourishes aside, it doesn’t take a psychic to see that Dems have melted down over Trump policies that are the same as Obama’s, then to see them claim their meltdown is over policy.