>But I've been complaining for years about Gore, Kerry, Clinton, and Abrams laying about stolen elections, and nobody listened.
If you said complaints about 2000 being stolen lead to skepticism about the outcome in 2004, and are part of a set of ideas that may have inflamed democratic skepticism about 2016, I would probably disagree that there is anything super concerning about that, but at least understand the thread that connects those pieces.
As it happens, I think stolen is a perfectly fair characterization of the 2000 election, even in retrospect, and would confess that that experience lead me, for a time, to incorrectly believe 2004 may have been stolen as well, which I believed for a time but no longer do. And I can see how it launched an unfortunate trend of liberals believing future elections either were or would be stolen. Greg Palast, for instance, is a celebrated journalist in some circles despite incorrectly claiming that the 2006 election would "go down in infamy" as a stolen election, and saying the same thing again in 2008. Despite being a Democrat, I find Palast's record to be deeply inaccurate and I am disappointed in the lack of critical reflection on his record by people who cite him.
But those claims come from a completely different universe than the 2020 claims, and I don't think they had anything to do with explaining the sociological forces driving election skepticism in 2020. Instead, that breed of skepticism has come from Trump and a media ecosystem that established an entirely alternate reality, with fever pitched adversarial thinking.
The content, social forces and motivations are completely independent, in their sources, in their character and in their scale and should not be equated to each other.