... y'know, if in some strange world things had flipped, the GOP won the popular vote but lost the EC for the first time, the dems were running an equivalent candidate (Though I'm not even sure how that would work. Torture camps for small business owners, mass exile of rural WWC people, somehow going full command economy?), and some subset of the GOP base was getting riled up more than usual, I'm not entirely sure many people would even notice. Protests are almost always pretty local, and given where R trends ahead, there's just... not many people around there. And no one really cares much regardless, most days. Couple dozen (maybe) people yelling outside a town hall know one's heard of doesn't tend to get as much attention.
Any case, who knows how the response would go. No one said much about the agitating and protest conservatives've kept up pretty consistently for the last eight years or so, after all, and the police/gov't/etc. tend to handle right wing people making a racket considerably more leniently. Fairly likely we wouldn't be hearing about riots at all from most sources, just maybe some shit about protests or concerned citizens or some crap.
Still, if the media coverage/response stayed roughly the same, reaction'd probably be fairly similar, just
without the GOP supporters also voicing a fair amount of condemnation. Probably more dead people, too. Might even get a few lynchings come back, who knows.
Maybe someone with better understanding than I can explain it... I just can't wrap my head around it.
Some of it's EC related. Most of it, from what I understand, is protesting who got elected and the platform they ran on. Not necessarily that it was an R candidate, but that it was
this one, that accepted/chose the VP they did, is drawing in the advisors they are, and made the campaign promises they did. Pretty strong narrative about not being quiet and docile in the face of hatred, from what I've seen. Going ahead and letting folks know that if trump goes through with some of his more egregious shit or doesn't keep pence and co on a short leash, people aren't going to just roll over and take it.
And ninja'd pretty much dead on. Damn cript, warn a fellow if you're going to be deploying cross continental mind reading.