Originally Posted by Pete F.
Both US intelligence agencies and Mueller’s investigation affirmed that Russian hackers wanted to help Trump win office and committed crimes toward that end. Trump even acknowledged it at one point.
A Senate Intelligence Committee report released on Thursday indicated that beyond hacking and propaganda campaigns, the Kremlin’s efforts included attempts to penetrate elections systems in all 50 states. It also affirms there is no evidence Russian hackers messed with vote totals or were able to change votes. So in that very narrow sense, the claim that Russia didn’t affect the outcome of the election is defensible.
University of Tennessee Knoxville study funded by the Defense Department found that Trump’s polling upticks during the 2016 campaign correlated with social media activity by Russian trolls and bots. According to the study, every 25,000 retweets from troll and bot accounts connected with Russia’s Internet Research Agency predicted a 1 percent bump in Trump’s polling.
Damian Ruck, the study’s lead researcher, told NBC’s Ken Dilanian that his findings indicate Russia played a very key role in Trump’s victory:
In an interview with NBC News, Ruck said the research suggests that Russian trolls helped shift U.S public opinion in Trump’s favor. As to whether it affected the outcome of the election: “The answer is that we still don’t know, but we can’t rule it out.”
Given that the election turned on 75,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, “it is a prospect that should be taken seriously,” Ruck wrote, adding that more study was needed in those swing states.
He points out that 13 percent of voters didn’t make their final choice until the last week before the election.
There is also a strong argument to be made that WikiLeaks, which published the first tranche of emails purloined from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta by Russian hackers just hours after the Washington Post published the Access Hollywood tape of Trump on October 7, swayed voters during the final month of the campaign. In this period, Trump overcame a string of sexual misconduct allegations and a 7-point deficit in the polls to win the election.
As Harry Enten noted for FiveThirtyEight in an analysis of WikiLeaks’ impact during the campaign’s closing stretch, the case remains circumstantial, but Americans were definitely paying attention to WikiLeaks. Enten found that for much of October, there was almost twice as much search interest in WikiLeaks than there was in the FBI, which was also in the news that month because of a letter then-Director James Comey sent to Congress publicizing the Clinton email investigation. Here are a couple additional important data points from Enten’s piece:
Trump, for instance, won among voters who decided who to vote for in October 51 percent to 37 percent, according to national exit polls. That’s Trump’s best time period. He carried voters who decided in the final week, when you might expect Comey’s letter to have had the largest impact, 45 percent to 42 percent.
It’s worth remembering that Trump’s closing message centered largely around WikiLeaks. He mentioned Julian Assange’s operation about five days a day during the campaign’s final month, but now pretends that never happened. (“Problematic is an understatement,” Mueller said on Wednesday about Trump’s promotion of WikiLeaks.) Is it possible the Clinton campaign email dumps and Trump’s relentless hyping of them on the campaign trail had no impact on the outcome of the election? It seems exceedingly unlikely.
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