77744
Seventy thousand, seven hundred and forty four is the number. That is the difference between the vote totals for Donald J Trump and Hillary R Clinton in three states: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Out of the 13,233,376 votes cast, the difference was 77,744. In Wisconsin, Trump won by 22,748; in Michigan, 10,704; and in Pennsylvania 44,292. Had these numbers been reversed, Hillary Clinton would have won the electoral college with 278 votes to 260 votes for Trump.
NYT – 2016 Presidential Election Results
We all know it was a close election. The difference in those three states is less than 0.6%.
So here’s the point: now that we are aware that the Russian Government, through a highly complex and orchestrated campaign against Hillary Clinton, influenced the United States elections in 2016, we don’t really need Trump “collusion” to come to a conclusion. All the Russian actions had to do was effect 77,744 votes in three states: convincing folks to vote for Trump versus Clinton, change their vote to a third party rather than Clinton, or stay home. All the Russians had to do was change 0.6% of the electorate in those three states for the outcome of the election to be changed. It’s a simple fact: the Russians changed the results of the election. Russian intervention elected Donald Trump.
They did it through a variety of means. They hacked into the Democratic National Committee, stealing emails and information which they strategically leaked out in a manner to not only damage Clinton, but to distract from the seemingly catastrophic failures of Trump. They used Wikileaks as their “cover,” trading on Julian Assange’s reputation of being the voice of those who “blew whistles” against “evil institutions.”
We now know they also developed a complex strategy, using “bots” to flood Twitter and Facebook with anti-Clinton messages, targeting those messages to those Clinton supporters who were “on the edge,” particularly those who originally supported Sanders. They also targeted pro-Trump folks, feeding them “red meat” stories, increasing their drive to the polls despite their misgivings about Trump himself. (Note: I am NOT saying that Sanders voters were more susceptible than others to Russian manipulation, I AM saying that we were ALL manipulated, tweet by tweet, and post by post, to be resentful towards Clinton, and to be less motivated to vote for her against Trump.)
Whether the Russians attempted to hack the “actual” vote count doesn’t even really matter. They hacked something much more significant: the new means by which we communicate and discuss our political thoughts and ideas. They got ahead of the American people by getting into our internal conversation. We were played.
More will come. Whether that manipulation in some way involved members of the Trump campaign, or the new President himself, is a whole different question. The results of those investigations may lead to a national change in leadership. But we are already in a national crisis: it is clear that Russia has chosen our President. It only took 77,744 changed minds, voters who stayed at home, or voters who were motivated to vote against Clinton. We’ve got the President the Russians wanted. Now what?
We have never been faced with this kind of crisis before. We need to ask the most serious question: if we know that the election was manipulated, and we can clearly see the results are in fact distorted by that manipulation, what do we do? In sports if a game is rigged, than the results are vacated. Ask the multiple Russian athletes who have lost their Olympic Medals due to their doping actions. Since we know that this election was tainted, as is clearly true with or without Trump campaign collusion, then what is the next step in our American saga? Will it take a “smoking gun” of Page, Manifort, Flynn, Sessions, Stone and Kushner’s direct cooperation with Russian actions? And if we know that the results were flawed, then how is it that the majority of the country (there’s that 3 million again) will swallow everything from Neil Gorsuch to the gutting of the EPA? Is it any wonder that the country feels “wrong?” It is.
