Nate Silver convincingly makes the case that FBI Director James Comey’s letter, which he sent on October 28th, cost Hillary Clinton the election. Silver doesn’t attempt to weigh other factors, most of which are impossible to measure. He just looks at what happened to Clinton’s standing in the polls from the moment news of Comey’s letter was first reported until the polls opened on November 8th.
Here’s the most important part of his argument:
The standard way to dismiss the letter’s impact is to say that Clinton should never have let the race get that close to begin with. But the race wasn’t that close before the Comey letter; Clinton had led by about 6 percentage points and was poised to win with a map like this one, including states such as North Carolina and Arizona (but not Ohio or Iowa).8 My guess is that the same pundits who pilloried Clinton’s campaign after the Comey letter would have considered it an impressive showing and spoken highly of her tactics.
Probably the most frustrating part of this analysis is that it doesn’t provide any remedy. Clinton would have won, but Comey intervened and she lost. However nauseous Comey feels about what he did, he says he’d make the same catastrophic decision all over again. He still has his job. There’s nothing to prevent something similar from happening in a future election.
What’s even worse is that focusing on the Comey letter risks absolving other people of blame who deserve blame, including Hillary Clinton. In a lot of ways, a Clinton victory would have carried the same downsides. But those downsides seem a lot more manageable than the world having to figure out how to survive a Trump administration.
A) I think it’s obvious that the Comey letter costs Clinton the election. Without the Comey letter, she would’ve won.
B) Political campaigns and candidates have agency. It’s impossible to know either way, but it’s conceivable (I’d say likely) that another campaign and candidate could’ve handled this without losing as much ground. One job of a campaign is to weather unfair shitstorms that are ruthlessly promoted by the media.
The campaign’s response to the email investigation was terrible from day one. It was a mistake but nothing was illegal but I shouldn’t have done it but there wasn’t really anything wrong about it etc etc.
Unfortunately the coverage of the email investigation was so terrible it’s hard to imagine a better response. The truth, that there was nothing wrong about anything Clinton did and the investigation was bullshit ratfucking from day one, wouldn’t have served her well.
The fact that media outlets, led largely by the NYT, devoted nearly the entirety of their resources to covering the nonissue of Clinton’s email practices (with the occasional foray into inventing fake Clinton Foundation “scandals”) while Trump’s history of fraud and criminality was largely ignored should be the story of the election. Instead the same journalists who blew their election reporting are doing everything they can to bury Comey’s responsibility. Because it’s their responsibility as well.
The last is half wrong. Trump got a ton of negative coveraged about his personal assholery as opposed to his professional, but the HRC campaign wanted it that way. There was very little coming from the campaign that wasnt tied to Trump hating brown people and women.
I’m talking about investigative reporting. We got Fahrenthold from WaPo doing good work on Trump, and basically nobody else at any major paper.
I think in response to B – there just wasn’t enough time to recover. Early voting already started and it fed the media machine that really wanted to talk about the emails.
Mission Accomplished
Comey saved Trey Gowdy’s reputation.
Once a Republican; always a Republican. Party over country every time.
Listened to part of the Senate hearing today, Comey’s sickening self-rightousness was on full display. “Ohhh, what is a poor servant to the Republic to do in such a situation???”
If only there was some guideline he could have followed about discussing investigations into candidates before the election…
I can’t see any Comey effect in the Early Vote in either Florida or North Carolina.
Not saying it didn’t happen, and it is hard to believe it wasn’t big enough to shift WI,MI, PA, but I am not so sure he is right.
If Comey had an impact, you should see it in a jump in GOP vote in the EV in the days shortly after the announcement. And you just don’t see it in Florida.
The entire approach of the Dems to wish away culpability in the election is laughable, really. After all, if it wasn’t Comey, it was the Rooshins. If it wasn’t the Rooshins, it was something else.
Anything but actual Democratic party positions and policies. Nope, they couldn’t be the problem. Nope, couldn’t be the Democratic pimping for illegals. Nope, never that. Couldn’t be the Democrats hatred for rural folks or working class folks. Nope, never that.
Rooshins or Comey. Or deplorables. Never forget the deplorables.
This the same issue with the 2000 election. Did Gore’s and the Democrats poor performance make the election close enough to steal?
On this, I’m have a both…and opinion.
It is clear from many Clinton campaign post-mortems that the candidate was disengaged, clearly not seeing danger. Gore had the same problem of disbelief about W’s prospects.
Comey’s actions were like the cumulative electoral screw-ups in Florida that pointed that something unusual was amiss. The poster child, although it did not amount to a large number of votes was the “butterfly ballot” that wound up switching votes from Gore to Pat Buchanan.
The Democrats are horrid at policy campaigning and the electoral system has become a sewer of bullshit in some locations.
I am coming around to the viewpoint you have long expressed here.
I vote for Clinton, and I worked for her. I never thought for a second of doing anything but voting and working for her.
But her victory would have masked what are very real problems. The Democratic Party simply doesn’t win very much. The Party’s decimation at the local level has created a situation where it would actually take a miracle for them to take the US House.
It would take a miracle to re-take the state legislatures in the states that will benefit from the 2020 census.
The Party is actually in terrible shape. Obama allowed us to pretend it wasn’t.
agree.
That’s just the thing. HRC won the popular vote by about 3 million and we have 48 Senators and are deep in the House minority. And that’s not even mentioning the state level. I kept saying that even had HRC won that it would just mask the fact that the Democratic Party is like a Potemkin village at the moment.
How different would the budget deal that was just signed if Clinton would have been President.
Less money for the military and for ICE. More money for O’care maybe.
But the difference wouldn’t have been huge.
THIS is horseshit. Preposterous claims like this make it difficult for those within the liberal/progressive movement to come together. It’s just so hostile to a fair reading of the likely outcomes that it serves to alienate us from each other.
I will never stop being furious with those who forward the premise that “Clinton and Trump aren’t very different.” The policies they advocated for in the ’16 campaign have greater degrees of differences than any pair of viable POTUS candidates in decades. Even after Trump has governed as crazily conservative as could have been imagined we get this shit.
And yes, I can see that the issue discussed here is the budget deal for the remaining months of ’17. Two points to that:
One of the important things which Bernie movement people fail to confront is that enough of the American people voted for a man who openly fans a white hot hatred against the people who support Bernie’s policies that they placed that man in the White House.
For those who are claiming that the American people will vote for Democratic Party candidates who campaign on a full set of economic populist and culturally pluralist policies, candidates who bring a past which gives them 1000% credibility when campaigning on those positions, it’s necessary to ask why the American people just placed into office a man who screamed “FUCK THOSE PEOPLE”.
Maybe the American electorate just isn’t as down with the Bernie agenda as many people here believe they are. We share disappointment about that, but it reminds us that it isn’t just the DNC which needs to do some soul-searching.
Stick it up your ass!
I guess somebody’s gotta do it — defend the indefensible. Good luck, dataguy. Really, good luck with that.
engaged and motivated to vote, hence least likely to be swayed by late-breaking events.
Haven’t read his analysis, but think his apparent focus on late shifts rather than early voting seems more valid, at least wrt Comey’s role.
I think a lot of the objection that Comey seems to gloss over was not should he have released the letter it’s he didn’t mention anything about the other candidate who was under a real investigation.
Comeys letter was decisive and I’m sticking with it. Plus he is an asshole.
Oct 22, 2016:
Obamacare premiums are set to skyrocket an average of 22% for the benchmark silver plan in 2017, according to a government report released Monday.
The price hike is the latest blow to Obamacare. Insurers are raising prices and downsizing their presence on the exchanges as they try to stem losses from sicker-than-anticipated customers.
Comey’s comments might have been important. But the Obamacare premiums cost increase was also EXTREMELY important. A WHOLE lot of people paid attention to that.
I don’t agree with this at all but not sure why it deserve a troll rating.
to your actual comment, those announcements come out every year and every year they fell flat, it’s a chicken little situation. Same thing happened before the 2012 election too but didn’t have an impact.
I think a lot of the increases are overblown since most people wouldn’t have noticed the difference anyway since subsidies would have picked up the slack
Rover is a moron. So is Beahmont. Their troll ratings have the same impact as the crap – of no value.
More people pay attention to the cost of insurance. The two happened at the same time.
And as to Nate Silver, the shine is off that guy. His little golden ticket is nothing but pyrite. He didn’t do any better than anyone else this election. He’s not even a pollster, he’s a consolidator, and the entire polling industry is completely out to lunch. So, put no stock in him. Michael Moore is the only guy who saw the Trump thing clearly. That’s ’cause he knows working class folks.
Actually, Silver and his team did do better than other in this election. In the last days, FiveThirtyEight was giving Trump around a 30% chance of winning; this link shows his estimates on Election Day:
https:/projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast
Silver received a lot of criticism when almost all other prominent polling analysts were giving Trump a much lower chance of winning.
posturer as “dataguy” would care about or pay any attention to those!?!?
(See also fast-and-loose treatment of “data” on premiums through Obamacare exchanges, selectively omitting that only increases not counter-balanced by subsidies are relevant.)
Really the most self-parodying nic anyone’s had the audacity to parade around here to date.
Strategic ignorance, it’s a helluva drug.
So, the intelligence community got Trump elected and now they are holding his feet to the fire?
Isn’t that basically the same strategy that the left had for a Clinton presidency? Though the intelligence community appears to be much better at it, with their general surveillance and well established media contacts.
Why, yes. Yes it does. It also risks getting you liberals so distracted by what amounts to a shiny object that you — once again — fail to ask, much less answer, the following question: is there anything that has happened to your Democratic Party in the last 37 or so years that would cause your “base” to walk away in disgust from the DP? Was there anything about the Clinton campaign that magnified, exacerbated all of these trends?
This would be a valuable investment of some time and energy because in about 3-1/2 years we’ll be having another Presidential election. You can either try to see what lessons can be learned, try to understand what happened in this mess this time, or not. If you don’t, you’ll more than likely keep on making the same mistakes, doing the same things over and over and expecting different results. Human nature and institutional bias pretty much guarantees it.
Or, you can focus on the Comey letter. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
“…you liberals…”.
I’m not sure what part of the base walked away in disgust that you’re referring to
So, tell me,what has the Democratic Party done in the last 37 years that caused its base to flee?
As one who’s been voting since 1962, I’ve only ever seen people fleeing the Democratic party to the Republican one because the latter gives cover to their unadmitted racism and disdain of those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder. They genuinely never had a problem when they were on the receiving end of Federal programs that gave them a leg up, but when those programs were targeted toward non-whites, only then did they have a problem.
The lack of consistency exists on the cruel right;not on the beneficent left. We just need to get better at sound byte messaging, even if it has no basis in reality.
Self described “leftists” appear incapable of understanding that the Democrats have been steadily losing ground over the past decade while also moving decisively to the left (in large part by excising the blue dogs). The median congressional Democrat today is significantly to the left of the median Democrat of the halcyon days of the 1970s. The party’s biggest defeat came as a direct consequence of passing the largest progressive reform since the Johnson administration.
Progressive policies should be supported because they’re the right thing to do ethically and economically but they certainly haven’t been a political winner for the Dems.
They have not been a political winner because they have not worked well enough for those in need of help. Had they done so, the Dems would not have been the political losers that they are today.
AG
Everything had been decided in my Ohio 6th district long before the Comey shuffle. The black guy had been president for 8 years, Hillary had been despised for even longer, and an opioid epidemic combined with long standing chronic unemployment had its claws deep into the Bill Johnson’s district which made the biggest shift to Trump from Romney’s numbers in the nation.
I would expect that some of that could be extrapolated to PA and MI.
All these arguments are so idiotic.
I mean I’m sorry, but if Comey’s letter was decisive, then it was decisive; it’s a statistical reality. If you want to challenge the math or the Nate Silver methodology, that’s legitimate (provided you’re actually challenging it rigorously based on a statistical understanding of the data). But beyond that there’s nothing to be said. Comey’s liability is exactly this, no more, no less.
Any discussion of what it “means” to be “focusing” on this or how liberals (or whatever label) are shirking the real questions about voters and neoliberalism and Hillary’s weakness and etc. etc. is a complete waste of time; a total distraction.
Presidential elections obviously have many moving parts; many factors. If the Comey letter, independent of any other factors, made the difference, then it made the difference. Accepting this doesn’t mean denying the importance or primacy of any other element in the equation. (If an rocket didn’t lift off because a particular piece of payload was too heavy, then removing that payload would have saved the launch — as would the equivalent tonnage saved elsewhere; this is obvious.)
I’m so tired of the way that discussions of what went wrong get so ridiculously acrimonious. The Comey letter made the difference; this is obvious. It doesn’t mean that she couldn’t have won with the Comey letter but without other weaknesses; this is just rudimentary high school logic and math.
And reprimanding people for focusing on this — like the mere act of discussing Comey’s egregious behavior somehow nullifies discussions of other progressive problems and work to be done across the spectrum of the country and the anti-Trump agenda — is just idiotic.
At first I read your comment and it seemed quite logical. By further thought, it’s equal to so many flawed reasoning. This can not ever be proven:
… but if Comey’s letter was decisive, then it was decisive; it’s a statistical reality.
Clinton numbers were already declining in October …
○ Emails in Anthony Weiner Inquiry Jolt Hillary Clinton’s Campaign | NY Times – Oct. 28, 2016 |
Simply put, for a flawed candidate this was the final drop in the bucket of water. Where to lay the blame?
Another interesting bit from NBC/WSJ poll of mid-October 2016. Due to the deceptive lead by Clinton in the polls, voters wanted to keep a Republican congress as a check and balance on a Democrat in the White House:
So Hillary’s unexpected defeat by Trump produced a double whammy!
There is NOTHING statistical about Silver’s opinion. It’s an opinion based on events in time. There is no statistical test or evaluation which can UNIQUELY ascribe the causal meaning to the Comey announcement that Silver is making.
Because, in the last 2 weeks, a lot of parts were moving around. Silver picked one, and I am sure it is important. It is not the only one, nor is it the most important. So it’s just puffery, really. Comey is the whipping boy. He is the New Rooshins.
I know your handle is “dataguy” and this presumably means something about your real identity/expertise…but come on. Nothing statistical about it?
The statistics may be tainted, but it’s an entirely statistical argument. What I’m objecting to is that people (here, and elsewhere) are reacting as if it’s a moral or philosophical argument about what we “should” be discussing rather than a measure of how egregious Comey’s move was and how much damage it did.
I’m not so sure that this episode is devoid of guidance. It was known that Clinton was being investigated during the primaries. Therefore, she should have done whatever was in her power to do in order to cauterize the wound at that time, much like Obama did with Rev. Wright (which I was convinced at the time could very well sink him in the general). Of course, voters could also have chosen someone else to be the nominee (I say this as a Clinton supporter). Comey’s letter was unexpected but not unforeseeable.
Obviously, another unforced error was dumbass Bill’s decision to speak to Lynch on his plane, and for dumbass Lynch to oblige his request. According to Comey, that played into his calculus in releasing the letter. I really don’t understand how either of those two idiots thought that such a meeting would avoid the appearance of shadiness/controversy.
Yet, the shadiness of a Presidential candidate publicly asking the Russian government to hack into the communications of his opponent wasn’t shady enough to prevent him from winning.
And the extravagant shadiness of a man who defrauded and abused broad numbers of consumers and small business owners in building his business empire wasn’t too shady to elect him President.
And it was totally unforeseen that the Justice Deparment would intervene in both of the last two weeks of the campaign. There are actual guidelines the Justice Department violated in doing so. It is a bit off to claim that something which had never happend before was foreseeable.
The Justice Department could have revealed their investigation of the Trump campaign, which we now know was going on since July. Yet the Department did not. Why not?