Donald Trump won The 2016 Election by
22,748 votes in Wisconsin 44,312 votes in Pennsylvania 9,528 votes in Michigan.
Out of 135,657,507 Americans voting, Donald Trump won the Presidency by 76,588 votes, or 0.056% of those voting.
In Michigan, for example, out of 4,799,284 votes cast, a margin of victory of 9,528 represents 0.19% of the vote. To put that into context, that means that in a representative room full of 1,000 Michigan voters, 501 would have voted for Trump and 499 would have voted for Hillary Clinton. In other words, if only 2 out of 1,000 voters had liked Hillary a bit more, or Trump a bit less, the election in Michigan, and all of their 16 electoral votes, would have gone to Clinton instead.
To say that less than 2 out of every 1,000 Michiganders, and similar numbers in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, were not affected by the constant drip, drip, drip of negative Wikileaks email revelations over the course of many months of the Presidential campaign, accentuated by Donald Trump's amplification of those leaked emails, accentuated by ads and constant news stories amplifying the worst aspects of those leaked emails, constantly taking Hillary Clinton's messaging and campaign off course and throwing them, relenttessly, into "Defense" mode instead of taking their own message to the people of Michigan and America . . . is to literally call Vladimir Putin stupid.
The former head of The KGB is not stupid and the effort to get incriminating emails and information about The DNC and Hillary Clinton was not stupid, nor the strategy of publishing little bit by little bit over the course of many months.
There is no question that these emails and this strategy had a devastating impact on the impression voters across America had about Hillary Clinton.
In fact, had Russia, or anyone, been able to get into Donald Trump's emails (or the emails of Kellyanne Conway or Cory Lewandowski or Paul Manafort or anyone else in the Trump campaign, that would have had a massive impact as well.
And there is no question that these emails and this strategy had a devastating impact on the enthusiasm of Democratic voters to go out to the polls and vote for Hillary Clinton. My own very Progressive friends would daily fill my Facebook page with quotes from these very emails along with remarks of disgust about Hillary Clinton and The DNC, and many of them did not vote for her as a result.
To say that there were not 76,588 voters in those critical 3 swing states that were not affected by THE number one story of the entire election is preposterous.
To say that Vladimir Putin is not a brilliant political strategist is even more preposterous.
Richard Greene is a Political Communication Strategist and author who has worked on countless political campaigns, including 7 Presidential campaigns in 5 countries.