This RT/Sputnik thing is probably misdirection, but knowing how Trump/Russia/etc got such good ROI is not hard to understand. The election came down to around 20k votes in three states. Combine an unprecedented data mining operation (Cambridge Analytica) with microtargetting enabled by social media companies, as well as the viral nature of fake news, its easy to see how a small amount of money can sway a marginal amount of voters in key states.

HRC was so confident in her upcoming landslide win she bought fireworks, and congratulated herself on her birthday as “future president”. Same time last year Trump was projected to have a 7% chance of winning, and that was by outlets that wanted to be perceived as impartial. Multiple accusations of sexual assault were leveled (all gone after the election), fake piss “dossier” (for which HRC paid in violation of campaign laws) was fabricated, the “free” press shat on Trump 24x7, etc, etc. Do you really, truly believe that it was $300K from the Russians, and not Clinton’s arrogance that tanked her prospects?

Your comment does a good job of summarizing the unique aspects of the 2016 election.

But keep in mind that all of the projections based on data collection, historical trends, polling, etc., had Trump suffering a decisive loss up until several hours into election night.

In order for the description to give to be true, you have to believe that all of the pollsters, Nate Silver, etc., didn't know what they were doing. The thing is, they did actually know what they were doing.

Crediting Cambridge Analytica, RT, the Russian government, Donald Trump, or anyone else with some sort of strategic genius because Trump won is utterly ludicrous.

Trump's strategy was innovative in that it blended things that had traditionally been part of the Democrats' and Republicans' platforms, but at no point did anyone on Trump's side have any remote degree of certainty that it would succeed. Trump was outspent by 4:1 or even 5:1 by the Clinton campaign.

This is not because he had a far more efficient approach and enjoyed a comfy lead the whole time, but because he simply didn't have the support from donors needed to spend more than that (and wasn't willing or able to invest more of his own alleged wealth).

Trump's win was not really even a win in the sense that many of the voters in rust belt areas that he "won" from Hillary had voted for Obama previously. HRC's campaign felt that the rust belt was not an area where Hillary needed to do more campaigning, and it's not clear they were wrong in thinking that. Maybe Trump's gruff pro-American bluster was unbeatable there, and Hillary would have struggled to seem sympathetic to the economic struggles going on there.

But the point is that Trump simply chose a strategy of combining national defense "strong man" posturing with the typical rust belt "buy American" playbook that Democrats have been using for years. Yes it's a bit racist, but it was when Democrats used it too.

Trump's strategy almost didn't work, and everyone who expected it not to work was probabilistically right. It had very low chances of winning and came down to the moves made by both candidates in the final days before the election that drove turnout more than they influenced candidate choice.

Yes the leaked email stories hurt HRC, but I think that her refusal to address the issue head on when asked about it and to offer full transparency was a big mistake. It conveyed an elitism and arrogance that might very well have led a lot of former or lukewarm supporters to stay home.

My point is that it wasn't about the detailed analytics, it was about the big, slow trends of rust-belt economic hardship and the resulting resentments, and Trump managing to beat a very mediocre and uninspiring GOP field to win the primary with his populist message.

I'd actually been predicting the onset of an authoritarian, trade-protectionist trend for a while but I did not think Trump would beat such a strong and well-funded establishment candidate.

I say this because in all of the chaos about "Russian meddling" we are told to believe a story that involves too many evil geniuses and too little acknowledgement of big, slow trends.

I don't think the Russian narrative is about any evil geniuses, but simply that clear unbiased political analysis is still a requirement for an effective campaign. It didn't take an evil genius to realize that Trump's only path to victory was through the rust belt. In fact, I saw that fact mentioned multiple times in the weeks leading up to the election. Hillary's mistake was buying into the media narrative of a 90+% chance of victory (and probably not really understanding what that means--a 1 in 10 chance of losing is not something to hang your hat on when the stakes are this high). They should have been spending 100 to 1 in the rust belt and focusing their message towards the issues of that region.

I also don't buy it that Hillary "coming clean" about the emails would have been preferable to denying any serious wrongdoing. Everyone claims they value honesty and openness, but its probably an example of people saying one thing while acting entirely differently. Is it preferable to let a narrative form against her, or to simply use her own words against her to claim she's unsuitable to be president? I don't know, but its far from obvious that just copping to every claim against her regarding the emails was the right move.

There were many campaign missteps and ignoring the rust belt was chief among them. But ultimately she did have the election in the bag until Comey's 11th hour memo about more emails being found. There are a lot of external factors that caused her to lose, but it should never have been that close and it was because of her blind spot for the rust belt.

> "coming clean" about the emails would have been preferable

I'm not suggesting there was anything to come clean about. But there were emails indicating that some of the campaign finance stuff relating to the Clinton Foundation was not above board. Not only did HRC not address this issue, but she didn't claim that the organization was just like many other similar orgs, or offer to offer a full audit of where the dollars went. Those are the totally obvious responses to allegations that lines have been crossed.

True, doing that would have played into the idea that the story was real, but keep in mind that there were emails from a disgruntled loyalist who was mad at Chelsea threatening to reveal the scheme as fraud.

The news orgs generally ignored this story for some reason, so maybe that's why there wasn't a specific response to it offered by the campaign, but in my view it is not really clear whether it was completely above board or not. Per my earlier comment elsewhere in the thread, I am concerned that lifetime public servant Paul Ryan has a net worth of $8M, and that the Clintons are worth $250M after public service careers.

What are the odds that Paul Ryan obtained that money legitimately? I'd say they are quite slim. If emails about Ryan were found that indicated a likely corrupt source of the funds, I'd hope that some journalist somewhere would pick up the story and take it to fruition. I'd hope the same thing about any major US political candidate, if there is evidence that a massive ($250M) fortune might have been improperly won through deals that violate campaign finance law.

It's not that I don't think Ryan or Clinton are relatively good "knowledge workers" for the jobs they end up in, it's that the purpose of campaign finance law is to prevent interest groups from being able to buy their way in. If we let our "nice" politicians get bought by interest groups in ways that violate campaign finance law, we are allowing the corrupting incentives to exist that campaign finance law is meant to prevent.

Surely, by the same token, congress should pass a law requiring the publication of a decade or more of income tax history for any personal wealth or companies where the candidate as a majority shareholder. Note that in spite of the massive opposition to Trump's failure to offer up his tax returns, no such law has been discussed. Chances are quite a few officials or would-be officials would rather not be subject to additional transparency requirements.

Comey's involvement was truly odd. I thought he should have been more thorough/careful before he dismissed the possibility of any wrongdoing initially. How long does it take for a team of people to review a few thousand emails. I think it could be done in a weekend if there was any motivation at all to resolve the issue in a timely fashion. So Comey not only chose to allow his actions to impact the election, but allowed his agency's tarnishing of the campaign to drag on and on in a completely unreasonable way. So in my view his last-minute comments were one of several major blunders. He's been challenged over his decisions, but I have not heard him challenged on why it takes so long to review emails. Of the 20K emails most were spam just like in any inbox. So we're talking about a few thousand pages of reading that took months and months for no apparent reason.

At this point I have a hard time taking seriously any claims against the Clintons. These two have been investigated inside and out for around 25 years. If the only people reporting on "new explosive allegations" are lawznews or thefederalist or w/e, that's a good sign its bogus. The fact that seemingly reasonable people still buy into the new round of innuendo every time a Clinton pops their head up is disheartening. The credence you give this stuff needs to be much lower.

And as far as Clinton's personal wealth, 15 years of book deals and 100k speaking engagements will create quite a nest egg. Let alone starting their careers as high powered attorneys. There's nothing unexplained here.

> investigated inside and out for around 25 years

Most of that was just politically motivated stuff. The difference is that the trove of emails was not filtered and research discovered the potentially implicating campaign finance stuff within that trove.

> 15 years of book deals and 100k speaking engagements

The personal wealth was likely done in a way that does not violate any laws. A donor can make a book deal happen with a $2M advance rather than violating laws by donating $2M. That's gray area but not surprising or concerning.

The potential area of concern is the way that the Clinton Foundation may have been used to collect donations from foreign governments in a pay-to-play arrangement. I'm not entirely sure whether it's reasonable that such things are illegal, but they are illegal so if someone is doing it we should all be concerned.

I'm pretty concerned about Paul Ryan's $8M as well. You didn't address this so I am guessing that you assume it all to be above board?

Campaign laws exist. It's absolutely possible that a small sum used illegally could have larger impact than a large sum spent legally.

(that said, I'm not an expert on campaign law and I'm not in a position to say what was/wasn't legal: I'm just trying to point out that it's not enough to look only at quantity spent)