Another Setback for the Democrats’ Stolen-Election Conspiracy Theory

Leading Democrats and their side’s prominent media voices spent years advancing the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump stole the 2016 election with the assistance of the Russian government. I’ve rounded up at length the evidence of their doing this, most recently here with regard to new House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (the post links to several others) and at greatest length here, citing figures of the, ahem, far-left fringe such as Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and John Lewis. It worked:

Democratic voters ate this stuff up. A December 2016 YouGov poll found that 52 percent of Democrats believed that it was probably or definitely true that “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President.” By late March 2019, that number had risen to 67 percent. The Associated Press in March 2017 touted a GenForward poll of Americans age 18–30 finding that “a majority of young adults — 57 percent — see Trump’s presidency as illegitimate, including about three-quarters of blacks and large majorities of Latinos and Asians.” A 2018 political science review of survey data found that “many Democrats think that the 2016 election result was rigged.”

Max Boot of the Washington Post argued in 2018, “Without the Russians, Trump wouldn’t have won”:

Outside experts who have examined the Kremlin campaign — which included stealing and sharing Democratic Party emails, spreading propaganda online and hacking state voter rolls — have concluded that it did affect an extremely close election decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, writes in his recent book, “Messing with the Enemy,” that “Russia absolutely influenced the U.S. presidential election,” especially in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Trump’s winning margin was less than 1 percent in each state . . . on social media, tens of thousands of Russian bots spread pro-Trump messages on Twitter, which has already notified about 1.4 million users that they interacted with Russian accounts. The Russian disinformation, propagating hashtags such as #Hillary4Prison and #MAGA, reflected what the Trump campaign was saying. The Russian bots even claimed after every presidential debate that Trump had won, whereas objective viewers gave each one to Clinton.

“Objective viewers” is quite the touch. Today, however, the Post‘s own cybersecurity columnist Tim Starks offers a reality check:

Russian influence operations on Twitter in the 2016 presidential election reached relatively few users, most of whom were highly partisan Republicans, and the Russian accounts had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior, according to a study out this morning. The study, which the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics helmed, explores the limits of what Russian disinformation and misinformation was able to achieve on one major social media platform in the 2016 elections. “My personal sense coming out of this is that this got way overhyped,” Josh Tucker, one of the report’s authors who is also the co-director of the New York University center, told me about the meaningfulness of the Russian tweets. “Now we’re looking back at data and we can see how concentrated this was in one small portion of the population, and how the fact that people who were being exposed to these were really, really likely to vote for Trump,” Tucker said. “And then we have this data to show we can’t find any relationship between being exposed to these tweets and people’s change in attitudes.”

This is common sense. The volume of campaign spending, coverage, and commentary in an American presidential election is colossal, most Americans are accustomed to being exposed to all manner of things that aren’t trustworthy or persuasive, and people are likeliest to fall for misinformation when it simply confirms their preexisting beliefs. As the study observes:

• Only 1 percent of Twitter users accounted for 70 percent of the exposure to accounts that Twitter identified as Russian troll accounts.
• Highly partisan Republicans were exposed to nine times more posts than non-Republicans.
• Content from the news media and U.S. politicians dwarfed the amount of Russian influence content the electorate was exposed to during the 2016 race.
• There was no measurable impact on “political attitudes, polarization, and vote preferences and behavior” from the Russian accounts and posts.

In fact, Tucker suggests that Democrats running with “Russians hacked the election” did more damage to our political system than the Russian efforts themselves:

One of the potential impacts was indirect, Tucker said: It opened the door for people to doubt that President Biden defeated Trump in 2020. “That campaign may have been more successful for reasons that it didn’t set out to be successful, but by getting caught and having all this discussion,” he said.

But tell us again, Democrats, why it’s perfectly harmless when your side peddles stolen-election theories and backs them with the investigative machinery of the federal government.