The Hillary Clinton campaign pinned blame on FBI Director James Comey for its stunning election night loss to Donald Trump.
Navin Nayak, the director of opinion research on the campaign, sent an email to senior staff Thursday evening outlining what the campaign believed were the reasons for its loss. The email, which was first reported by Politico, was confirmed to Business Insider by a Clinton campaign staffer.
Nayak signaled in the email that the campaign believes two bombshells from Comey in the final days of the election helped swing the electorate toward Trump — an initial Comey letter to Congress that reactivated an investigation into Clinton's private email server, and a subsequent letter last Sunday that again cleared her of wrongdoing.
"We believe that we lost this election in the last week. Comey's letter in the last 11 days of the election both helped depress our turnout and also drove away some of our critical support among college-educated white voters — particularly in the suburbs," Nayak wrote. "We also think Comey's 2nd letter, which was intended to absolve Sec. Clinton, actually helped to bolster Trump's turnout."
While I also think that the impact of the Comey letter was devastating for Hillary Clinton, that first letter changed poll numbers almost overnight, I also think there were other factors at play.
Such as the third party candidates:
In Michigan, where the election was so close that the Associated Press still hasn’t called the result, Trump is ahead by about 12,000 votes. That’s significantly less than the 242,867 votes that went to third-party candidates in Michigan. It’s a similar story elsewhere: third-party candidates won more total votes than the Trump’s margin of victory in Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida. Without those states, Trump would not have won the presidency.
Some pundits are dismissing the impact of third party voters on the outcome of this election, but I think it is pretty clear they had a significant impact. And I think fewer protest votes might very well have carried the day for Clinton.
However as bad as the FBI intrusion and the third party votes were, I also think we need to remember that the Russian hackers and Wikileaks definitely had an impact as well.
We have now seen more of Hillary Clinton's e-mails than any other presidential candidate in history, and I would argue that if we had been given a similar peek into Donald Trump's e-mails he would not only NOT be the president-elect but he would probably be serving time.
I keep hearing idiots saying that Hillary Clinton lost this election, but if that were true it would not have required the combined forces of the Republican party, conservative media, Wikileaks, Russia, and the FBI to bring her down.
So did James Comey cost Hillary Clinton the election?
Well if he did he certainly had a lot of help in doing so.
Source http://ift.tt/2fuzziP
