That this kind of gullibility is more than just politically dangerous became clear in December when Edgar Welch of Salisbury, North Carolina, stormed into Comet Ping Pong, a pizza joint on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C., filled mainly with parents and children. Welch was carrying a handgun and an assault rifle, which he fired. He later explained that he intended to "self-investigate" reports that had been ricocheting around the Internet asserting that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta operated a child trafficking ring out of that restaurant. Fortunately, no one was hurt.
The hoax that fooled the benighted Edgar Welch first appeared on the Internet in late October, shortly before the election. Via Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and other platforms, users subsequently clicked it onward several million times. Among the enthusiastic retweeters of this sort of claptrap (if not the specific Comet Ping Pong story) was retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, whom Trump has named his national security adviser, a position for a modicum of probity, if not honesty, used to be a requirement. (Flynn's son did, however, promote the Comet story on social media.)
In the echo chamber of the Internet, the drone of half-truths and lies blurs the edges of the real. Eventually, it imparts a kind of lazy, unevaluated validity to memes of all kinds: Hillary is a crook, immigrants are criminals, Muslims are terrorists. In such a world, Trump's chronic mendacity becomes unremarkable. This is political branding, advertising, and product definition in the twenty-first century. It's part of what the spinmeisters call "seizing the narrative," and the more you seize it for your side, the harder it becomes for your opponents to make their case. Truth is beside the point.
Russian faux-news stories, purloined emails, and "exfiltrated" documents dogged the Democratic campaign. They were like gnats that packed a painful bite, buzzing continually wherever Clinton went. They distracted the media and the public from Trump's much more substantial sins and reinforced the memes that he and his proxies chanted at every opportunity. They built toward a death by a thousand cuts. That was the background. Then, into the foreground stepped FBI Director James Comey.
Out of Line
On October 28th, only 11 days before Election Day, with early voting already underway in many states, Comey delivered a letter to Congressional leaders stating that, "in connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation" of Hillary Clinton's private email server. They were, devastatingly enough, on a computer that scandal-ridden former Congressman Anthony Weiner had shared with his wife and Clinton aide Huma Abedin. At the time, Comey did not have a warrant to inspect those emails or any idea what the emails specifically contained. He released his letter in violation of longstanding Justice Department procedures and contrary to direct advice from Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
The most sympathetic thing that might be said about Comey's rogue gambit was that he felt a muddle-headed sense of obligation to keep the public and, more particularly, Republican members of Congress informed about developments in an investigation that he had declared resolved nearly four months earlier. A darker interpretation is that he dropped his bomb intending to help the Trump campaign, which, if true, would constitute a violation of the Hatch Act and entitle him to an extended stay in a facility populated by people he used to prosecute. We may never know his motives in full, but it is rumored that he will offer some kind of statement after the inauguration.
Motives aside, Comey's letter detonated across the late-stage election landscape. Predictably the media went into overdrive, as did Trump. With his usual bombast he proclaimed that "this is bigger than Watergate," and the spinning went on from there. Clinton's polling numbers nosedived. On November 5th, Comey issued a follow-up letter in which he conceded that, um, well, the trove of emails added absolutely nothing new to the previously dormant investigation. This 11th hour admission did little to mend the damage already inflicted on Clinton and may, in fact, only have deepened the injury by keeping the item in the news and underscoring the suspicions many voters felt toward her.
Nate Silver, at FiveThirtyEight, suggested that the flap may have cost Clinton a three-point swing among the electorate and calculated that, after the Comey bombshell hit, the probability of her winning the presidency plunged by 16%. He also suggested that Comey's letter may have influenced down-ballot races, especially in the all-important struggle for control of the Senate. Bloomberg reported even more dramatic numbers, finding that Clinton's 12-point lead eroded to a single percentage point, making the race essentially a dead heat.
Digging deeply into the "Comey Effect," Sean McElwee and his colleagues at Vox found that it correlated with sharp downturns for Clinton in both national and state polling, probably accounting for a surge toward Trump that was particularly pronounced among "late-deciders" -- people who made up their minds only when they were at the brink of going to the polls. Moreover, the surge was likely shaped by an astonishing "peak" in the negative news coverage of Clinton, centering on her emails. In the last week of the campaign, 37% of all coverage of Clinton was "scandal"-related, far higher than had been the case for months.
These are powerful statistics. Three percentage points in an election in which nearly 129 million ballots were cast for the top two candidates amounted to 3.87 million votes. Add them to the 2.86 million by which Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote, and you have a victory margin more than a million and a half votes larger than that by which Obama beat Romney in 2012. You also have a big win in the Electoral College. People would have been talking about a landslide.
As things turned out, Trump's victory in the Electoral College was determined by fewer than a combined 100,000 votes in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. You can massage the numbers many different ways, but if Comey's letter accounted for only 2% of Trump's votes in those states, then without the letter Clinton would have won all three of them -- and the presidency.
Elections are always contingent: weird stuff happens. In 1960, Richard Nixon hit his knee on a car door moments before the first-ever televised presidential debate. He'd just had surgery on the knee to combat a staph infection, and the pain from the swelling bump undermined his performance.
It's an old story: for want of a nail, a shoe is lost, for want of a shoe, a horse, and the rest is history. But the intervention of a high government official on a completely politicized hot-button issue at the apex of a presidential campaign is unprecedented in American history. It exceeds by orders of magnitude the contingencies of elections past.
Voter Suppression
In the last year or two did you receive a postcard from election authorities asking you to confirm your present address? I did. Those postcards originate from Operation Crosscheck, a brainchild of Kris Kobach, the Republican secretary of state in Kansas, in which 27 states collaborated to uncover the identities of citizens registered to vote in multiple states. That's a common enough occurrence since people rarely bother to cancel old registrations when they move from one state to another. Sounds benign, right?
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