Silver, whose model had been more conservative than most throughout the race, concluded, “Clinton would almost certainly be President-Elect if the election had been held on Oct. 27 (the day before the Comey letter).” Professor Sam Wang, who runs the Princeton Election Consortium, called Comey’s letter “a critical factor in the home stretch” and found a 4-point swing.
Here’s a particularly stark way of understanding the impact: Even if Comey caused just 0.6 percent of Election Day voters to change their votes, and even if that swing only occurred in the Rust Belt, it would have been enough to shift the Electoral College from me to Trump.
This is why Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times columnist, has started ironically tweeting “Thanks, Comey,” every time he sees some new outrage from the Trump White House. Comey made a choice to excoriate me in public in July and then dramatically reopen the investigation on October 28, all while refusing to say a word about Trump and Russia. If not for those decisions, everything would have been different. Comey himself later said that he was “mildly nauseous” at the idea that he influenced the outcome of the election. Hearing that made me sick.
From Russia with No Love
The second big factor that caused the bottom to fall out at the end of the race was the Russian plot to sabotage my campaign and help elect Trump. Michael Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, has described it as “the political equivalent of 9/11.”
The emails Russia stole from John Podesta and provided to WikiLeaks ensured that the words Clinton and emails were in the headlines even before Comey’s letter. The subterranean torrent of fake news added to the problem. For voters, the stories merged to create an overpowering fog of scandal and mistrust. Even if there was no fire, there was enough smoke to choke our campaign.
Because no evidence has emerged yet of direct vote tampering, some critics insist that Russian interference had no impact on the outcome at all. This is absurd. The Kremlin’s information warfare was roughly equivalent to a hostile super PAC unleashing a major ad campaign, if not worse. Of course it had an impact. (And for those obsessed with actual tampering, since we keep learning more about Russian intrusions into our election systems, maybe this is what the administration and Secretaries of State across the country should be investigating instead of a nonexistent epidemic of voter fraud.)
Nate Silver’s website FiveThirtyEight.com looked at Google searches as a measure of how much the WikiLeaks story broke through with actual voters. He found that—except for immediately after Comey sent his letter on October 28—there were more searches about WikiLeaks than the FBI during the final weeks of the race. That did make some sense. The mainstream media provided blanket coverage of Comey, so there was no need to search for more information about that. The WikiLeaks stories, however, could send searchers down deep internet rabbit holes.
Google searches about WikiLeaks were particularly high in swing areas with large numbers of undecided voters, like Cambria County in Pennsylvania and Appleton, Wisconsin. In other words, a lot of people were online trying to get to the bottom of these crazy claims and conspiracy theories before casting their votes. Too often, what they found was more misinformation and Russian-directed propaganda.
Together, the effects of Comey’s letter and the Russian attack formed a devastating combination. Silver concluded after the election that if it hadn’t been for these two late-breaking factors, I likely would have won Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by about 2 points. Instead, I lost all four by less than 1 point on average, and Michigan by just two-tenths of a point.
What Explains Trump’s Support?
All of this is depressing, infuriating, and ultimately unsatisfying. Outside interference may help explain why enough votes shifted in the final days to give the Electoral College to Trump. But it doesn’t explain why the race was close to begin with, close enough that late movement in a few states could make the difference. It doesn’t really explain how sixty-two million people—many of whom agreed Trump was unfit for the job—could vote for a man so manifestly unqualified to be President. This may be the more important question for understanding what’s going on in our country right now.
Start with the 13.3 million Republicans who voted for Trump in the primaries. It’s safe to say these are mostly hard-core supporters—the ones Trump was talking about when he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Thirteen million is a lot of people to strongly support someone most Americans think is unqualified and unfit, but they account for less than half of all Republican primary voters and less than 10 percent of all general election voters. It’s a mistake to give those base voters more political weight than they deserve. More interesting and important is how Trump consolidated support among the much larger pool of voters beyond his base.
Besides antipathy toward me, probably the biggest factor pushing Trump skeptics into his camp was pure partisanship. There’s an old saying that “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.” That was proven true once again in 2016. I won 89 percent of Democratic voters. Despite the example of a few courageous “Never Trumpers,” Trump won 90 percent of Republican voters. Many of them preferred a different candidate in the primaries. Many were surely disgusted by his outrageous behavior, including his treatment of women. Yet when it came down to it, the R next to his name was more important than anything else. Maybe this was about the Supreme Court, or the assumption that he would end up rubber-stamping the congressional GOP’s agenda, especially big tax cuts for the rich. Maybe it reflects a deeper partisan element in our politics.
Either way, it stands in stark contrast to what happened in the French election in 2017, when conservatives and socialists alike crossed party lines and rallied behind centrist Emmanuel Macron to stop the extremist Marine Le Pen. In France, patriotism trumped partisanship. Some analysts say French voters watched what happened here and acted to stop it there. So did the Dutch in their election, defeating the right-wing nationalist Geert Wilders. Of course, it helps when the candidate who gets the most votes wins the election. What an idea! If our voters had known more about what Putin was doing on Trump’s behalf, would it have made a difference? All I can say is that I believe Americans are just as patriotic as the French and the Dutch.
Partisanship is powerful, but it was far from the only factor fueling Trump’s support. As I noted earlier, a desire for change was also important. Exit polls tell us that 39 percent of voters said the ability to bring change was the most important quality in a candidate, and 82 percent of them supported Trump. By comparison, 22 percent of voters said having the “right experience” was most important, and they went for me 90 to 7. The 20 percent who said “good judgment” was most important supported me 65 to 25. And the 15 percent who wanted a candidate who “cares about me” went 57 to 34 for me. In other words, “change” voters provided the bulk of Trump’s support.
Change can mean different things to different people. But as I’ve noted, this was a challenge I grappled with from the very beginning. History shows how hard it is for a party to hold on to the White House for three terms, even after successful presidencies. I castigated Republican obstruction in Congress and offered lots of solutions to make the economy fairer and politics cleaner, but I never escaped being pigeonholed as the candidate of continuity rather than change. Certainly, if voters wanted to “shake things up” or “burn it all down,” they were more likely to choose Donald Trump over me. They weren’t in any mood to remember that great old Texas saying from Sam Rayburn, the former Speaker of the House: “Any jackass can kick down a barn. It takes a good carpenter to build one.”