Best smart stuff on Russia in 2016 election I can find. As promised--threatened, Jochen. Smile.(I hope)

[Mark Kohut]

*First, some intrepid reporters found one or two citizens who voted for
Trump *
*from effects felt at Fake rallies and by Russian bots, they themselves
said. So, if true and if a few found in the haystack, could 80,000+ (in the
right places) be 'turned' 'motivated' out of the tens of millions reached? *

>From Nate Silver. I eliminated most of the back-up (which is there to read
IF): 1. Russian interference is hard to measure because it wasn’t a
discrete event.
2. The magnitude of the interference revealed so far is not trivial but is
still fairly modest as compared with the operations of the Clinton and
Trump campaigns.

*3. Thematically, the Russian interference tactics were consistent with the
reasons Clinton lost.*

The indictment also alleges that the Russian conspirators sought to suppress
<https://twitter.com/ThePlumLineGS/status/964561472746672129> African-American
turnout. A decline in black turnout
<https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/black-voters-arent-turning-out-for-the-post-obama-democratic-party/>
was
an important — perhaps even decisive
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/05/08/why-did-trump-win-more-whites-and-fewer-blacks-than-normal-actually-voted/?utm_term=.7a92e646e7ac>
—
factor in Clinton’s defeat, although it may have been inevitable given that
Barack Obama, the first African-American president, had been on the ballot
in 2012.
------------------------------

But if it’s hard to prove anything about Russian interference, it’s equally
hard to *disprove* anything: The interference campaign could easily have
had chronic, insidious effects that could be mistaken for background noise
but which in the aggregate were enough to swing the election by 0.8
percentage points toward Trump — not a high hurdle to clear because 0.8
points isn’t much at all.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/01/how-russia-helped-to-swing-the-election-for-trump

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html