Do you remember 24/7 commentary bemoaning the refusal of Democrats to accept the election of Trump as legitimate? Neither do I.

The situation in which Democrats refused to accept Trump as legitimate was far different from a few years earlier when huge majorities saw Barack Obama’s election as legitimate. But it was reminiscent of 2001, when a significant number of Democrats said they did not view a president as having been legitimately elected — back then, it was George W. Bush.

What’s going on? Perhaps it is a sore loser effect. If your candidate loses, you don’t accept the loss as legitimate. If that is the case, the sore loser effect is somewhat selective — for example, it did not apply in Obama’s case.

Maybe there is more going on. Beginning in the middle of the 2016 race, the Hillary Clinton campaign sought to tie Trump to Russia and plant in the public’s mind the idea that Russia was trying to rig the election for Trump. “Over the course of the final month, the [Clinton] campaign would try a variety of methods to force the media into giving more airtime and ink to the idea that Russia was trying to throw the election than to the contents of Podesta’s emails,” wrote Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in their Clinton-friendly campaign account Shattered. “They thought Russia’s meddling would have better legs.”