How Much Did Wikileaks Hurt Hillary Clinton?

[portlander23]

How Much Did Wikileaks Hurt Hillary Clinton?
Harry Enten
FiveThirtyEight

Wikileaks was almost exclusively an October story. Over 72 percent of people who searched for Wikileaks from June onward did so during October or the first week of November. Interest really got going with Julian Assange’s press conference on Oct. 4 announcing that there would be more information coming from Wikileaks about the election. From there, it was a steady barrage. In contrast, only about 40 percent of searches involving Clinton and Trump in general from June onward came in October or the first week of November. Just over 50 percent of searches for Comey specifically happened during this period.

There just isn’t a clean-cut story in the data. For instance, you might have expected a decline in the percentage of Americans who trusted Clinton after Wikileaks began its releases. As Politico’s Ken Vogel pointed out in mid-October, both Trump campaign officials and even progressives said the Wikileaks emails revealed that Clinton would be “compromised” if she became president. But the percentage of Americans who found Clinton to be honest or trustworthy stayed at around 30 percent in polling throughout October and into November.

The evidence that Wikileaks had an impact, therefore, is circumstantial. Trump, for instance, won among voters who decided who to vote for in October 51 percent to 37 percent, according to national exit polls. That’s Trump’s best time period. He carried voters who decided in the final week, when you might expect Comey’s letter to have had the largest impact, 45 percent to 42 percent. (Although, Trump’s margin among those who decided in the final week was wider in the exit polls in some crucial swing states.) And while Clinton’s lead was dropping in the FiveThirtyEight polls-only forecast before the Comey letter was released, the drop accelerated slightly afterward.

[pkdu]

1. Search for wikileaks????

It was broadcast media 24/7.

80,000 votes in rural counties later...well, you know.

[JHan]

2. Yes it would have:

Uncurated data was scoured for scandalous headlines, no matter how silly.

Even mundane email exchanges were exploited by media : e.g. emails between Podesta and Palmieri about dogmatic catholics became a thing for two weeks and may have hurt Clinton among Catholics. All the other "revelations" would have contributed to doubt and mistrust and trustworthiness was made into a big issue for Clinton this year.

And a lot of the talk about wikileaks ignores the major point which is violation of privacy.

"I have some dark secrets. Some I am not proud of, some that are fine by me but I know would be better kept private. So do you. So does everybody. And the more complex your life, the more “big” things you have done in the world, the bigger your mistakes and other secrets are. It is true for all of us. This is one of the reasons the world needs privacy to work.

The 2016 US election hack makes clear the big challenge. In a world where everybody has secret flaws, the person who can point the flashlight at their enemies, and not themselves or their friends, has a truly powerful weapon. Now that we conduct our entire lives on computers, those who can penetrate them can learn those secrets.

"When one house has a big pile of dirty laundry in front, we know intellectually that all the other houses almost surely have a similar pile in the basement. But the smell of the exposed one is clear, and it’s bad, and we can’t keep our minds on that fact. So we can be manipulated, even though we know we are being manipulated.

In this election, we got to see exposed various flaws at the Democratic National Committee. The flaws were real (though on the scale of such things, not overwhelming.) Our gut reaction, though, is to feel, “it doesn’t matter how we learned this, it’s still bad and not to be ignored.” We feel this even though we know the information was gathered illegally, then disclosed to manipulate us. That’s because generally we do and should love whistleblowers. They are usually brave heroes. But what we learn that the whistleblower revealed the secrets not for the public good, not to expose a wrong, but instead cherry-picked what to expose to manipulate us, we must do something else we normally taught is wrong and “shoot the messenger.”"

- http://ideas.4brad.com/terrible-power-computer-espionage-our-world-shame

[HoneyBadger]

3. People love scandal

They still talk about if JFK cheated on his marriage, if Lincoln had a real marriage, if Washington was accused of treason by Jefferson, and these are the Presidents that we universally agree were the greatest.

[baldguy]

4. Wikileaks was just a tool of Russia.

[LaydeeBug]

5. First sentence is false AF. It is the premise for the rest of this bullshit. nt

[stevebreeze]

6. The biggest impact the leaked emails had was to keep progressives fighting amongst themselves.

This wasted effort has still not stopped.
And yes the Comey letter was clearly more decisive.
The last thing that made a big difference we can not measure is how many people were purged from the roles or lacked the "proper" ID or were dissuaded from trying to vote for fear their ID would be challenged.