This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

By some intelligence estimates, Russia never expected that Trump would actually win. Their main goal was to bruise Clinton and throw her victory into question. When Trump won that November, it was impossible to say, statistically, what impact Russian meddling had. Disinformation experts reported that the Russian kompromat had little effect. But I am not so sure. The numbers show that, in fact, Trump not only lost the popular vote by three million votes but received a smaller share of the vote than Al Gore, John Kerry, and Mitt Romney in their losing campaigns. It wasn’t so much that Trump won in 2016 as that Clinton lost. A number of longstanding voting trends either reversed or stalled in 2016. Black voter turnout—the very constituency Russian trolls aggressively targeted—declined sharply in 2016 for the first time in twenty years. And Trump’s 2016 victory margin in swing states was smaller than the total votes for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate buoyed by Russian trolls. In Wisconsin, where Clinton lost by 23,000 votes, Stein won 31,000; in Michigan, where Clinton lost by 10,704 votes, Stein garnered 50,000.