Won - I don't think that word means what you think that word means.

Is this a phenomenon of Humpty-Dumpty postmodernism, of redefining words to mean what is desired, rather than what they actually mean? From Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

In 2016, we had the losing presidential contender refuse to acknowledge her loss, a position also taken by the mainstream media, by the establishment party, by academia. She insisted that she won the election because she won the popular vote.

This ignores the fact that the winner won under the system in place (a federal republic) rather than winning under a hypothetical and imaginary alternative system (a direct democracy.) Her claim was specious but widely touted and endorsed by the Mandarin Class.

She and the Mandarin Class also ignored that this outcome, while not common, has occurred with some frequency. Presidents routinely win without even a popular vote majority, usually due to third-party impacts. Presidents not uncommonly win the electoral college without winning the largest number of votes due to being a federal republic. These are not only not uncommon, they are a consequence of choices we have made to avoid the well known and documented dangers clearly associated with direct democracy.

The point is that she lost the election by the well-established rules we all know and operate under and yet insisted that she had not lost because she won the popular vote.

A couple of years later, we had the example of Stacey Abrams in Georgia, in an historically high turnout election, who lost the absolute popular vote (1,978,408 to 1,923,685, an indisputable 55,000 vote advantage) as well as by the percentages, 50.2% versus 48.8%, a 1.4% loss. No electoral college issues this time. A clear, if surprisingly narrow, loss. Ever since she has insisted that she won the election despite the vote count. She has insisted that her supporter's votes were suppressed despite their record high voting rates.

If democratic elections are all about the smooth transition of power between parties and leaders, we are plowing ground that seems to argue that elections should be "won" by those who think they want it the most, rather than won by gaining the support of the broadest coalition of voters. Democrats really won 2016. Stacey Abrams is really governor of Georgia.

And yet that is not what voters wanted.

Now we have this headline out of the bungled Iowa caucus. Sanders Declares Victory in Iowa, Claims Media Are Distorting Results by Josh Christenson.

The argument once again rests on an Iowa equivalent version of an electoral college (versus a direct headcount vote).

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) on Thursday declared victory in the Iowa caucus before the final results were published, saying the media are wrong to treat Pete Buttigieg as the winner.

"I think it is fair to say that we won the caucus," the presidential candidate said, claiming a "very significant victory" after being projected to win the popular vote of Monday night's caucus.

A reporter in the audience asked Sanders why he was not waiting for the final votes to be counted, saying the announcement might frustrate some members of the Democratic Party and confuse an already chaotic process.

"Well, I would hope, given the fact that we have waited three days and now there's the talk of another recount, maybe we might want the decisions of the Iowa caucus before the November election," Sanders said. "What is not going to change is that we won a very significant victory in the popular vote. We won a very significant victory in the realignment vote."

"If you ask people, ‘How do you determine who wins an election?'" Sanders continued, "well, from where I come from and where everybody else comes from, the person who gets the most votes wins."

The Vermont senator also said the media were distorting the caucus results.

"You guys have been putting too much emphasis on these SDEs [state delegate equivalents]. There's a confusion that SDEs will determine the number of national delegates. National delegates are important. SDEs do not determine—they determine who the party chair is," he said.

The current count of state delegate equivalents has Buttigieg with a slight lead, while Sanders leads slightly among caucus-goers' final vote preferences.

My point is not that politicians will spin. That is in their DNA.

My point is that I don't recall arguments of this sort twenty and more years ago.

Sure, politicians argued that a vote total was too close and there might need to be a recount. With some frequency a loser might claim they had won a moral victory if they did better than expected but still lost.

But I don't recall politicians arguing that they were the actual winners when they clearly lost.

There are innumerable permutations of democracy. People dispute which forms are better than others and they mostly all have different strengths and weaknesses. But I don't recall politicians claiming victory in one electoral contest based on the fact that the results would have been different under a different set of rules.

Clinton, Abrams, Sanders - they are all claiming victory where there was no victory. They are all, effectively, rejecting the rules by which everyone else has agreed to play. They are carving out a fantasy world for themselves and of their own creation in which they cannot lose. In their naked pursuit of power or as a form of psychological grief treatment, they are rejecting the wishes of those who play by the rules.

This can't be good for anyone.