That Russian or Russian-backed hackers were involved in stealing Democratic documents in 2016 is something none of the intelligence agencies appear to dispute. There is considerable disagreement between the CIA and other agencies about the precise motivations. Perhaps a less asked and more important question is about its effectiveness.
A lot of people seem to assume that Putin just chose the American government. That is a rather robust claim, given what we know. But the presidential race wasn’t the only one where hacks figured. Today, a story by McClatchy’s James Rosen explores some of the House races where documents from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee were leaked or became an issue. In nearly every case, the Democratic candidates themselves and the DCCC discount the idea that their election loss hinged on the documents.
Take, for example, the case of former Democratic Rep. Joe Garcia, who unsuccessfully sought this year to regain his Miami-area seat. His Democratic primary opponent, Annette Taddeo, was already a multiple election loser, she was expected to lose that primary by double digits before her internal strategy memo was leaked by the hacker known as “Guccifer 2.0.” Taddeo had complained to the New York Times that the hack cost her the election. In fact, though, it got very little play in the local press — just one blog entry that was viewed by about 500 people before Election Day, presumably not all of whom voted in the district. And in the end, Taddeo did much better than expected, losing only narrowly. Garcia, who was widely viewed as the more formidable Democratic candidate anyway, lost his rematch against Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo.
North of there, on the Treasure Coast, the defeated Democratic House candidate Randy Perkins scoffed at the idea his 10-point loss had anything to do with DCCC leaks about himself. He attributed it more to the fact that Donald Trump had carried St. Lucie County — the first Republican to do so since 1992.
There are other examples in the piece as well with respect to House races. But this is an important point in the presidential race as well. As alarming and inappropriate as Russian interference may be, we just don’t know how effective the Clinton-related leaks were in changing minds.
In a close election like the one just finished, one can easily assert that any one thing swung the race, and it comes off as at least plausible. That doesn’t make it so. A campaign that loses after spending millions to run up a meaningless score in Chicago and New Orleans might have had bigger problems than the release of John Podesta’s risotto recipe.
The illegally hacked and leaked Podesta emails may have helped keep Clinton’s team on its heels, and that might have affected the outcome a bit. But none of the material in Podesta’s emails was smoking-gun-worthy or even terribly memorable.
The most damning one I remember featured an offensive discussion between Clinton luminaries of efforts to subvert the Catholic Church’s leadership (“a Middle Ages Dictatorship”). But even that pertains to a niche audience of observant Catholics and didn’t get much play outside the conservative and Catholic presses. (We mentioned it after it came up in a televised interview with Tim Kaine.) Another controversy generated by those emails had to do with Donna Brazile being given a debate question in advance during the primaries. I thought it an important story, but I am skeptical that most voters even know who Brazile is.
By far the biggest and most important leak was the first one from the DNC. Published July 22, it raised suspicions that the official party organization was tipping the scales in Clinton’s favor and against Sen. Bernie Sanders. How many Bernie supporters actually bolted the party because of that?
We will never know for sure. One could start by looking at the 300 percent improvement in vote totals by the Green Party candidate Jill Stein. But Stein’s performance, although much better than 2012, was also a vast underperformance from her polling all year. Stein’s national polling peak of nearly 5 percent (according to the RealClear average) came in June, before that DNC leak unseated the party’s chairwoman. On Election Day, Stein got only 1 percent of the vote.
It’s still possible that Democrats did not return to the fold quite as quickly as they might have otherwise, but that’s basically a guess. And the fact that Stein did better than Green Party candidates normally do might have had more to do with Clinton problems that predated the leaks and even Trump’s unlikely rise. On July 15, a week before Wikileaks published the DNC documents and Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as the organization’s chairwoman, the CBS/New York Times poll showed 67 percent of voters believed Clinton to be dishonest and untrustworthy. That result was typical of many polls taken around that time, and Russian hackers had nothing to do with that.
