Vlad the Hacker?

The same political experts who told us that Trump would never win the primary and certainly never win the Presidency are now telling us that Russia has essentially staged a coup and “hacked” our election.

No, and here’s why.

The data tell a different story which is pretty straight forward: Donald Trump performed exceptionally well in the Democrats’ own back yard and Hillary Clinton failed to mobilize the cadre of voters who gave Obama eight years in office.

There are 2 theories put forward to support this conspiracy theory: 1) Russia influences the election by pushing fake news and 2) Russia hacked DNC emails which were released to the public.

As to the first accusation multiple reports have shown that fake news stories promoted over social media did NOT influence the election.

As one study author put it: “for fake news to have changed the outcome of the election, a single fake article would need to have had the same persuasive effect as 36 television campaign ads.”

Is it conceivable that Russia, hacking into our institutions, publishing information, and wreaking havoc through fake news sites could swing the election by 44,000 votes to Donald Trump?

Elections do not occur in a vacuum and you must examine them in the light of previous elections to understand the existing support and trajectory of a political party and ideas.

How did Trump v. Hillary perform compared Romney v. Obama?

In Pennsylvania, for example, Trump received 2,970,733 and Hillary received 2,926,441 votes. The margin was 44,292 votes. However, looking at the trajectory of elections… Trump received 290,299 more votes that Governor Romney. Hillary received 63,000 fewer votes than President Obama.

2016 votes key states and comparisons to 2012 votes for Romney v. Obama

If you combine the 3 key states which put Trump over the top, PA, WI and MI, Donald Trump brought in 455,307 more votes that Romney. Hillary Clinton on the other hand (wait for it) received nearly 600,000 fewer votes than Obama in 2012.

That’s a lot of people that Russian agents must have bribed via Facebook shares to change the election outcome.

Let’s tackle the second allegation: Russian hacking of the DNC and John Podesta and the subsequent relase of emails changed the election.

On November 4th I declared that Trump was going to win the election based on Gallup’s voter registration polls and one other key data set: Pennsylvania party registrations.

You see, Pennsylvania is one of the few states that tracks not only party registrations but also how many people moved from one party to another.

The PA department of state shows over 88,000 Democrats switched their affiliation to Republican in 2016. Only 33,000 Republicans moved in the opposite direction. All together 103,000 voters switched from the two core parties to third parties or unaffiliated status.

75% of all of those registrations happened, wait for it… before the primary elections in April.

That’s right. Before Russian agents convinced Donna Brazille to leak debate questions to the Clinton campaign; before Kremlin spies posed as underage hotties to take down Anthony Weiner and months before Vladimir Putin personally disguised himself as a plumber to fix Hillary’s email server and hack into the DNC… Pennsylvania voters had already decided that Trump, through all of his failings, better reflected the issues they cared most about.