Russian trolls backed Green Party candidate Jill Stein during the presidential election, according to an indictment released Friday by the U.S. special counsel. The indictment alleges Russian agents deliberately boosted Stein as part of a larger effort to undermine the U.S. electoral process.
“Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein,” the Russians wrote on a fake “Woke Blacks” Instagram account. “Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.”
Pointing to those laughably lame efforts, some are now insinuating that without Kremlin backing of Stein, Hillary Clinton could have won the contest. Shortly after Deputy Attorney General Rob Rosenstein dropped the indictment, David Axelrod, the political strategist who made Barack Obama president, seemed to take solace in this speculation.
Jill Stein received 50,700 votes in MI. Trump won by less than 12,000. She outpolled Trump’s margin in WI, as well.
If Russians sought to redirect alienated HRC voters to third parties, as indictment alleges, it was a shrewd ploy. https://t.co/1igEg7PV4S— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) February 16, 2018
While shrewd, that strategy wasn’t effective. Imagine Stein doesn’t get shady Russian support and Clinton does win in Michigan and Wisconsin like Axelrod imagines. Those combined 26 electoral votes wouldn’t put her across the finish line. Trump would still beat Clinton 278-253. To win, Clinton would have needed one more state. She lost Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes. Does anyone think that “Woke Blacks” won Jill Stein 44,000 of her 50,000 Pennsylvania votes?
But imagine again that Stein stays out of the race altogether. Even then it would be a leap in logic to assume that the entire disgruntled liberal would flock to Clinton. Winning over that resentful voting block would require a herculean effort that the mechanically stiff Clinton clearly wasn’t capable of pulling off. It seems more likely that many of those voters would write in Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., stay home, or even vote Trump out of spite.
The obvious consensus is that Clinton lost because she was such a bad candidate she didn’t even show up in certain states. Winning it all would’ve required real political skill, the kind she clearly lacked.
None of this means that the Russians didn’t make a brilliant move though. While they knew Stein would never win, they couldn’t know whether Trump or Clinton would triumph. They flipped a coin and it came up chaos. The fact that we still have questions about the election more than a year later, that we would even elevate Stein to determining-factor status, demonstrates how badly they undermined the system.
