Friday, July 20, 2018

Russian influence or was Hillary just a bad candidate?

Nate Silver points out that:
How did Trump win? Or more to the point, how did Trump win given that he only had a 38 percent favorability rating among people who voted on Election Day? The answer is partly the Electoral College, of course. But it’s also that Clinton was really, really unpopular herself — almost as unpopular as Trump — with a favorability rating of just 43 percent among Election Day voters. Also, the substantial number of voters who disliked both Clinton and Trump went to Trump by a 17-point margin. Voters really weren’t willing to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt.
That’s largely because Clinton was viewed as dishonest and untrustworthy, exactly the sort of message that the Russian campaign (which used hashtags such as #Hillary4Prison) was trying to cultivate. Trump, of course, was trying to cultivate this message too. Media coverage often struck the same themes. And voters sometimes heard variations on this theme from Sanders and his supporters in the more contentious moments of the Democratic primaries. Was some of this Clinton’s fault? Yep, of course. Would Clinton still have been “Crooked Hillary” even without the Russians? Almost certainly. But the Russians were at least adding fuel to the right fire — the one that wound up consuming Clinton’s campaign.
It's hard to tell what was "Russian influence" or Hillary's own faults the way I read that since a lot of people were talking about "Hillary for Prison" without having the Russians involved. Toss in her reputation for not being trustworthy was due to her own actions and position flipping. There was a 2008 Obama ad that "She'll Say Anything And Change Nothing".

Toss in the bottom line that you were taken by Russian influence if you voted for Trump, Sanders, or Jill Stein. I can honestly say that the DNC is rife with Russian Operatives if that is the basis for saying Russian operatives fixed the election. The DNC's actions pretty much were why I left the Democratic Party.

We can also get into Media complicity in giving Trump free air time which increased his profile.

You also have to remember that the standard for burden of proof in a criminal conviction is "beyond a reasonable doubt", or "that no other logical explanation can be derived from the facts except that the defendant committed the crime, thereby overcoming the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty."

Anyway, I am 100% certain any "Russian influence" was insignificant compared to internal US actions. Any investigation worth the money needs to look into the US institutional problems which led to the 2016 election disaster.

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