Sources and Methods

Warren P. Strobel at WP:

The Trump administration pushed to unveil a highly classified document on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election after an intense behind-the-scenes struggle over secrecy, which ended in late July when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a minimally redacted version of the report, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

Gabbard, with the blessing of President Donald Trump, overrode arguments from the CIA and other intelligence agencies that more of the document should remain classified to obscure U.S. spy agencies’ sources and methods, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, like others interviewed for this report, because of the matter’s sensitivity.

...

The document that Gabbard ordered released on July 23 is a 46-page report stemming from a review begun in 2017 by majority Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. It takes issue with U.S. intelligence agencies’ finding earlier that year that Russian President Vladimir Putin developed a preference for Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton and aspired to help him win the election.

Multiple independent reviews, including an exhaustive bipartisan probe by the Senate Intelligence Committee, have found that Putin intervened in part to help Trump. Two former CIA officials who led the intelligence agencies’ assessment told The Washington Post they stood by their sourcing and analysis.

The House report is the most sensitive document the Trump administration has yet released, and details of how its publication occurred have not been previously reported.

The document contains multiple references to CIA human sources reporting on Putin’s plans. Such sources are among the agency’s most closely guarded secrets. After the report was completed in 2020, it was considered so sensitive that it remained in storage at the CIA rather than on Capitol Hill.

Democratic lawmakers and former U.S. intelligence officials have objected to how the Trump administration released the report, saying it could imperil future intelligence-gathering on threats against the United States.

“I almost felt like I was going to get in trouble for having read that document,” Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior CIA and White House official, told the podcast “SpyTalk.” “Sources and methods could be easily inferred in almost every instance. … I don’t know if I’ve seen a document of that sensitivity so lightly redacted.”

DNI Makes False Claims About Russian Interference

 Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are prominent influencers.

BYRON TAU and ERIC TUCKER at AP:

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard this month declassified material she claimed proved a “treasonous conspiracy” by the Obama administration in 2016 to politicize U.S. intelligence in service of casting doubt on the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory.

...

CLAIM: “The intelligence community had one assessment: that Russia did not have the intent and capability to try to impact the outcome of the U.S. election leading up to Election Day. The same assessment was made after the election.” — Gabbard to Fox News on Tuesday.

The documents Gabbard released do not support her claim. She cites a handful of emails from 2016 in which officials conclude Russia had no intention of manipulating the U.S. vote count through cyberattacks on voting systems.

President Barack Obama’s administration never alleged voting infrastructure was tampered with. Rather, officials have said, Russian operatives hacked emails of prominent Democrats that were subsequently released through WikiLeaks and launched a covert social media campaign to sow discord and inflame U.S. public opinion. More than two dozen Russians were indicted in 2018 in connection with those efforts.

Republican-led investigations in Congress have affirmed that conclusion, and the emails that Gabbard released do not contradict that finding.

...

CLAIM: “There was a shift, a 180-degree shift, from the intelligence community’s assessment leading up to the election to the one that President Obama directed be produced after Donald Trump won the election that completely contradicted those assessments that had come previously.” — Gabbard to Fox News on Tuesday.

There was no shift.

The emails Gabbard released show that a Department of Homeland Security official in August 2016 told then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper there was “no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count.”

The public assessment the Obama administration made public in January 2017 reached the same conclusion: “DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.”

ODNI Misleads About Russian Influence Operations

 Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are  prominent influencers.

Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration attempting to undermine the eight-year-old assessment that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said the information she was releasing showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials to harm Mr. Trump.

Democrats denounced the effort as politically motivated, error-ridden and in contradiction with previous reviews of the assessment.

Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called Ms. Gabbard’s accusation of treason “baseless.”

Intelligence agencies and Senate investigators spent years reviewing the work, and concluded that during the 2016 election, the Russians conducted probing operations of election systems to see if they could change vote outcomes. While they extracted voter registration data in Illinois and Arizona, and probed in other states, there was no evidence that Moscow’s hackers attempted to actually change votes.

The Obama administration assessment never contended that Russian hackers manipulated votes. 

Russia also conducted influence operations to change public opinion. That included using fake social media posts to sow division among Americans and leaking documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee to denigrate Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee.

Multiple reviews, including a Republican-led Senate report, backed the findings of American spy agencies in late 2016 that Russia was trying to influence the election by damaging Ms. Clinton’s campaign and bolstering Mr. Trump.

Among the Republican senators on the Intelligence Committee that produced the various reports on Russian influence operations was Marco Rubio of Florida, now the secretary of state.

The new report by Ms. Gabbard’s staff conflates those two activities by the Russians and tries to suggest that the Obama administration forced the intelligence community to alter its conclusions.

Party and Health

 Hamamsy, T., Danziger, M., Nagler, J., & Bonneau, R. (2021). Viewing the US presidential electoral map through the lens of public health. PLOS ONE, 16(7), e0254001. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254001

Health, disease, and mortality vary greatly at the county level, and there are strong geographical trends of disease in the United States. Healthcare is and has been a top priority for voters in the U.S., and an important political issue. Consequently, it is important to determine what relationship voting patterns have with health, disease, and mortality, as doing so may help guide appropriate policy. We performed a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between voting patterns and over 150 different public health and wellbeing variables at the county level, comparing all states, including counties in 2016 battleground states, and counties in states that flipped from majority Democrat to majority Republican from 2012 to 2016. We also investigated county-level health trends over the last 30+ years and find statistically significant relationships between a number of health measures and the voting patterns of counties in presidential elections. Collectively, these data exhibit a strong pattern: counties that voted Republican in the 2016 election had overall worse health outcomes than those that voted Democrat. We hope that this strong relationship can guide improvements in healthcare policy legislation at the county level.

Treasury Goes After Russia

A Thursday release from the Treasury Department:

Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) took sweeping action against 16 entities and 16 individuals who attempted to influence the 2020 U.S. presidential election at the direction of the leadership of the Russian Government.

This announcement follows the Intelligence Community’s (IC) “Assessment of Foreign Threats to the 2020 U.S. Federal Elections.” The IC assessment addresses the intentions and efforts of key foreign actors, including Russia, to influence or interfere with the U.S. elections and undermine public confidence in the election process. Russia employed a system of government officials, disinformation outlets, and companies to covertly influence U.S. voters and spread misinformation about U.S. political candidates and U.S. election processes and institutions.

...

Today’s actions highlight how multiple Russian officials, proxies, and intelligence agencies coordinated to interfere with recent U.S. elections. Private and public sector corruption facilitated by President Vladimir Putin has enriched his network of confidants, who used their illicit business connections to advance Russia’s campaign to undermine the 2020 U.S. presidential election—and to give Russia plausible deniability in its disinformation activities. Members of this network include First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration of Russia Alexei Gromov (Gromov), previously designated as a government official pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13661. Gromov leads the Kremlin’s use of its media apparatus that sought to exacerbate tensions in the United States by discrediting the 2020 U.S. election process. As a result, Treasury is designating Gromov pursuant to E.O. 13848 for having attempted to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

TREASURY TARGETS DISINFORMATION OUTLETS CONTROLLED BY RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE SERVICES

Russian Intelligence Services, namely the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), play critical roles in propagating Russian disinformation online. The FSB, GRU, and SVR operate a network of websites that obscure their Russian origin to appeal to Western audiences. Outlets operated by Russian Intelligence Services focus on divisive issues in the United States, denigrate U.S. political candidates, and disseminate false and misleading information. The GRU and FSB were first designated in 2016.

The FSB directly operates disinformation outlets. SouthFront is an online disinformation site registered in Russia that receives taskings from the FSB. It attempts to appeal to military enthusiasts, veterans, and conspiracy theorists, all while going to great lengths to hide its connections to Russian intelligence. In the aftermath of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, SouthFront sought to promote perceptions of voter fraud by publishing content alleging that such activity took place during the 2020 U.S. presidential election cycle.

NewsFront is a Crimea-based disinformation and propaganda outlet that worked with FSB officers to coordinate a narrative that undermined the credibility of a news website advocating for human rights. Part of NewsFront’s plan was to utilize Alexander Malkevich, who is also being re-designated in today’s action, to further disseminate disinformation. NewsFront was also used to distribute false information about the COVID-19 vaccine, which further demonstrates the irresponsible and reckless conduct of Russian disinformation sites.

The Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF) is an online journal registered in Russia that is directed by the SVR and closely affiliated with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. SCF is controlled by the SVR’s Directorate MS (Active Measures) and created false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials involved in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. It publishes conspiracy theorists, giving them a broader platform to spread disinformation, while trying to obscure the Russian origins of the journal so that readers may be more likely to trust the sourcing.

The GRU operates InfoRos. InfoRos calls itself a news agency but is primarily run by the GRU’s 72nd Main Intelligence Information Center (GRITs). GRITs is a unit within Russia’s Information Operations Troops, which is identified as Russia’s military force for conducting cyber espionage, influence, and offensive cyber operations. InfoRos operates under two organizations, “InfoRos, OOO” and “IA InfoRos.” InfoRos used a network of websites, including nominally independent websites, to spread false conspiracy narratives and disinformation promoted by GRU officials. Denis Tyurin (Tyurin) held a leadership role in InfoRos and had previously served in the GRU.

...
TREASURY TARGETS KNOWN RUSSIAN AGENT KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK

Konstantin Kilimnik (Kilimnik) is a Russian and Ukrainian political consultant and known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy. Additionally, Kilimnik sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In 2018, Kilimnik was indicted on charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice regarding unregistered lobbying work. Kilimnik has also sought to assist designated former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych. At Yanukovych’s direction, Kilimnik sought to institute a plan that would return Yanukovych to power in Ukraine.

Kilimnik was designated pursuant to E.O. 13848 for having engaged in foreign interference in the U.S. 2020 presidential election. Kilimnik was also designated pursuant to E.O. 13660 for acting for or on behalf of Yanukovych. Yanukovych, who is currently hiding in exile in Russia, was designated in 2014 pursuant to E.O. 13660 for his role in violating Ukrainian sovereignty.

...
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence election interference report can be found on its website.

View more information on the persons designated today.

Federalism and Russian Election Interference

The Senate Intelligence Committee has issued a heavily-redacted report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.  Though it did not discover any evidence that the Russians changed any election tallies, it found that the Russians targeted every state.

Russian efforts exploited the seams between federal authorities and capabilities, and
protections for the states. The U.S. intelligence apparatus is, by design, foreign-facing,
with limited domestic cybersccurity authorities except where the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can work with state and local partners. State election officials, who have primacy in running elections, were not sufficiently warned or prepared to handle an attack from a hostile nation-state actor.
...

In an August 15, 2016, conference call with state election officials, then-Secretary [of Homeland Security Jeh] Johnson told states, "we're in a sort of a heightened state of alertness; it behooves everyone to do everything you can for your own cybersecurity leading up to the election." He also said that there was "no specific or credible threat known around the election system itself. I do not recall—I don't think, but I do not recall, that we knew about [State 4] and Illinois at that point."-- The Committee notes that this call was two months after State 4's system was breached, and more than a month after Illinois was breached and the state shut down its systems to contain the problem. During this call, Secretary Johnson also broached the idea of designating election systems as critical infrastructure.

A number of state officials reacted negatively to the call. Secretary Johnson said he
was "surprised/disappointed that there was a certain level of pushback from at least those who spoke up.... The pushback was: This is our—I'm paraphrasing here: This is our responsibility and there should not be a federal takeover of the election system."

Old People Share Fake News

Andrew Guess, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua Tucker have an article at Scientific Advances titled "Less Than You Think: Prevalence and Predictors of Fake News Dissemination on Facebook."

The abstract:

So-called “fake news” has renewed concerns about the prevalence and effects of misinformation in political campaigns. Given the potential for widespread dissemination of this material, we examine the individual-level characteristics associated with sharing false articles during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. To do so, we uniquely link an original survey with respondents’ sharing activity as recorded in Facebook profile data. First and foremost, we find that sharing this content was a relatively rare activity. Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains, which in 2016 were largely pro-Trump in orientation, than liberals or moderates. We also find a strong age effect, which persists after controlling for partisanship and ideology: On average, users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group.

Russian Interference

AT WP, Craig Timberg and Tony Romm write that reports for the Senate Intelligence Committee analyze Russian interference in American politics.

The research -- by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a network analysis firm -- offers new details on how Russians working at the Internet Research Agency, which U.S. officials have charged with criminal offenses for meddling in the 2016 campaign, sliced Americans into key interest groups for targeted messaging. These efforts shifted over time, peaking at key political moments, such as presidential debates or party conventions, the report found.

...
The Russians aimed particular energy at activating conservatives on issues such as gun rights and immigration, while sapping the political clout of left-leaning African American voters by undermining their faith in elections and spreading misleading information about how to vote. Many other groups -- Latinos, Muslims, Christians, gay men and women, liberals, Southerners, veterans -- got at least some attention from Russians operating thousands of social media accounts.

The report also offered some of the first detailed analyses of the role played by YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, and Instagram, owned by Facebook, in the Russian campaign, as well as anecdotes about how Russians used other social media platforms -- Google+, Tumblr and Pinterest -- that have gotten relatively little scrutiny. The Russian effort also used email accounts from Yahoo, Microsoft’s Hotmail service and Google’s Gmail.

AXIOS HAS THE TEXT OF THE REPORTS. 

Largest Counties, 1988 and 2016

One measure of change in the electorate is the performance of Republican presidential candidates in the 15 largest counties in 1988 and 2016.  On average, GOP performance dropped about 19 percent.

	1988	2016
Los Angeles CA	46.90%	22.40%	-24.50%
Cook IL (Chicago)	43.40%	20.80%	-22.60%
Harris TX (Houston)	57.00%	41.60%	-15.40%
Maricopa AZ (Phoenix)	64.90%	47.70%	-17.20%
San Diego CA	60.20%	36.60%	-23.60%
Orange CA	67.70%	42.30%	-25.40%
Miami Dade FL	55.30%	33.80%	-21.50%
Kings NY (Brooklyn)	32.60%	17.50%	-15.10%
Dallas TX	58.40%	34.30%	-24.10%
Riverside CA	59.50%	44.40%	-15.10%
Queens NY	39.70%	21.80%	-17.90%
Clark NV (Las Vegas)	56.40%	41.70%	-14.70%
King WA (Seattle)	44.80%	21.00%	-23.80%
San Bernardino CA	60.00%	41.50%	-18.50%
Tarrant TX	61.20%	51.70%	-9.50%
			-19.26%

Unequal Death Rates

Olga Khazan at The Atlantic:

A new study out today in the Journal of the American Medical Association drills down into which states are showing increases in deaths among the young, and why. In doing so, it reveals a profound disparity among the states when it comes to both life expectancy and disability.

Most startlingly, since 1990, 21 states have seen an increase in the death rate among people aged 20 to 55. In five states—Kentucky, Oklahoma, New Mexico, West Virginia, and Wyoming—the probability of early death among young adults rose by more than 10 percent in that time frame. Meanwhile, in New York and California, young and middle-aged people became much less likely to die in the same time period. The authors note that opioids, alcoholism, suicide, and kidney disease—which can be brought on by diabetes and alcoholism—were the main factors leading to the increases in early deaths.

In 2016, the 10 states with the highest probability of premature death among 20- to 55-year-olds were West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arkansas, New Mexico, Louisiana, Tennessee, and South Carolina.

Meanwhile, the 10 states with lowest probability of premature death among this age group were Minnesota, California, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Washington, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Hawaii.

Of the 10 states with the highest probability, all but New Mexico voted for Trump.

Of the 10 states with the lowest probability, all voted for Clinton.

Using Pop Culture to Counter Russian Disinformation

Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Jaffe at WP report on Russian disinformation in 2016. Richard Stengel, the undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department, tried as early as 2014 to push back.

Stengel’s best bet was Michael M. Lynton, then the chairman of Sony Pictures, who had grown up in the Netherlands and immediately understood what Stengel was trying to do. He recalled how in the 1970s one Dutch political party sponsored episodes of “M.A.S.H.” to portray America as sympathetic to the antiwar movement. A rival party bought the rights to “All in the Family” to send the message that U.S. cities were filled with bigots like Archie Bunker.

But Sony’s agreements with broadcasters in the region prevented Lynton from giving away programming. Other studios also turned Stengel away.

Back in Washington, Stengel got Voice of America to launch a round-the-clock Russian-language news broadcast and found a few million dollars to translate PBS documentaries on the Founding Fathers and the American Civil War into Russian for broadcast in eastern Ukraine. He had wanted programing such as “Game of Thrones” but would instead have to settle for the likes of Ken Burns.

“We brought a tiny, little Swiss Army knife to a gunfight,” he said.

Russia and Facebook

Examples of Fake Facebook posts from 2016 

House Intelligence held a hearing yesterday.  From the committee minority staff:

Russia exploited real vulnerabilities that exist across online platforms and we must identify, expose, and defend ourselves against similar covert influence operations in the future.  The companies here today must play a central role as we seek to better protect legitimate political expression, while preventing cyberspace from being misused by our adversaries. 

• Memo Describing Representative Sampling of Advertising
• Exhibits Used During Open Hearing
• Additional Advertising Not Used During Open Hearing
• Russian-linked Twitter Handles

News, Social Media, and Russian Meddling

From Pew:

As of August 2017, two-thirds (67%) of Americans report that they get at least some of their news on social media – with two-in-ten doing so often, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. This is a modest increase since early 2016, when (during the height of the presidential primaries) 62% of U.S. adults reported getting news from social media. While a small increase overall, this growth is driven by more substantial increases among Americans who are older, less educated, and nonwhite. This study is based on a survey conducted August 8-21, 2017, with 4,971 U.S. adults who are members of Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel.

For the first time in the Center’s surveys, more than half (55%) of Americans ages 50 or older report getting news on social media sites. That is 10 percentage points higher than the 45% who said so in 2016. Those under 50, meanwhile, remain more likely than their elders to get news from these sites (78% do, unchanged from 2016).

...
Looking at the population as a whole, Facebook by far still leads every other social media site as a source of news. This is largely due to Facebook’s large user base, compared with other platforms, and the fact that most of its users get news on the site. Specifically, about two-thirds of Americans (66%) use Facebook, and a majority of those users get news on the site, similar to 2016. Looked at as a portion of all U.S. adults, this translates into just under half (45%) of Americans getting news on Facebook.

From Facebook:

There have been a lot of questions since the 2016 US election about Russian interference in the electoral process. In April we published a white paper that outlined our understanding of organized attempts to misuse our platform. One question that has emerged is whether there’s a connection between the Russian efforts and ads purchased on Facebook. These are serious claims and we’ve been reviewing a range of activity on our platform to help understand what happened.

In reviewing the ads buys, we have found approximately $100,000 in ad spending from June of 2015 to May of 2017 — associated with roughly 3,000 ads — that was connected to about 470 inauthentic accounts and Pages in violation of our policies. Our analysis suggests these accounts and Pages were affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia.

Web Patterns in 2016

A report from the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard:

"In this study, we document polarization in the media ecosystem that is distinctly asymmetric. Whereas the left half of our spectrum is filled with many media sources from center to left, the right half of the spectrum has a substantial gap between center and right. The core of attention from the center-right to the left is large mainstream media organizations of the center-left. The right-wing media sphere skews to the far right and is dominated by highly partisan news organizations,” co-author and principal investigator Yochai Benkler stated. In addition to Benkler, the report was authored by Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, and Ethan Zuckerman.
The fact that media coverage has become more polarized in general is not new, but the extent to which right-wing sites have become partisan is striking, the report says.

The study found that on the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations. Robert Faris, the Berkman Klein Center’s research director, noted, "Consistent with concerns over echo chambers and filter bubbles, social media users on the left and the right rarely share material from outside their respective spheres, except where they find coverage that is favorable to their choice of candidate. A key difference between the right and left is that Trump supporters found substantial coverage favorable to their side in left and center-left media, particularly coverage critical of Clinton. In contrast, the messaging from right-wing media was consistently pro-Trump." Conservative opposition to Trump was strongest in the center-right, the portion of the political spectrum that wielded the least influence in media coverage of the election.

In this recently-emerged universe, Breitbart stands at the center of a right-wing media ecosystem and is surrounded by sites like Fox News, the Daily Caller, the Gateway Pundit, the Washington Examiner, Infowars, Conservative Treehouse, and Truthfeed, according to the report’s analysis.

Turnout

Many posts have discussed voter turnout.

From the Census:

Figure 1 presents voting rates for the citizen voting-age population for each presidential election since 1980. In 2016, 61.4 percent of the citizen voting-age population reported voting, a number not statistically different from the 61.8 percent who reported voting in 2012.

Turnout varies by age:

And education:



See here for more on race and turnout in 2016.

Democracy and the Internet

 From Nathan Persily, "Can Democracy Survive the Internet?" Journal of Democracy 28 (April 2017): 63-76.

If the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential campaigns had seemed to confirm Internet utopians’ belief that digital tools enhance democracy by expanding citizen empowerment and engagement, the 2016 campaign highlighted the challenges that the Internet poses for American democracy, and perhaps democracy in general. The surprising robustness of the campaign mounted by Bernie Sanders, the Independent senator from Vermont who challenged Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic nomination, seemed to pick up where Obama’s two campaigns and even Howard Dean’s in 2004 had left off: A  andidate running against the establishment proved able to raise money, organize supporters, and mobilize voters as never before. Trump fulfilled this promise too: He showed how the Internet can enable an outsider to run for—and win—the presidency
by means of a nontraditional campaign despite being outspent two-to-one by an establishment opponent.

From the point of view of the health of liberal democracy, the Internet’s great promises are also its pitfalls. Its liberating, anti-establishment potential can be harnessed by demagogues who appeal to the worst impulses of the mob. By aiding and abetting the disruption of established (and in some ways, outdated) institutions, such as political parties and the media, the Internet left a void that could then be filled not only by  direct appeals from candidates, but also by fake news and propaganda. Furthermore, the anonymity and lack of accountability that give Internet speech its power—in whistleblower cases or in repressive contexts such as those faced by Arab Spring demonstrators—also enable foreign powers to intervene secretly in campaigns and allow trolls to commit racial and sexual harassment. Finally, the Internet’s unprecedented ability to facilitate the targeted delivery of relevant information, marketing, and even friendship also leads to the bubbles, filters, and echo chambers that shelter people from information that might challenge the messages sent to them by campaigns, partisan media, or social networks.

Landslide Counties as Safe Spaces

Bradley Jones reports at Pew:

In the wake of the 2016 election, Republicans and Democrats who live in the “safest” counties politically – those that their party’s presidential candidate won by overwhelming margins – expressed more willingness to address political differences in conversation than did partisans living in counties where the vote was more competitive.

 

Religious Breakdown

 Peter Beinart writes at The Atlantic:

When pundits describe the Americans who sleep in on Sundays, they often conjure left-leaning hipsters. But religious attendance is down among Republicans, too. According to data assembled for me by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the percentage of white Republicans with no religious affiliation has nearly tripled since 1990. This shift helped Trump win the GOP nomination. During the campaign, commentators had a hard time reconciling Trump’s apparent ignorance of Christianity and his history of pro-choice and pro-gay-rights statements with his support from evangelicals. But as Notre Dame’s Geoffrey Layman noted, “Trump does best among evangelicals with one key trait: They don’t really go to church.” A Pew Research Center poll last March found that Trump trailed Ted Cruz by 15 points among Republicans who attended religious services every week. But he led Cruz by a whopping 27 points among those who did not.

Why did these religiously unaffiliated Republicans embrace Trump’s bleak view of America more readily than their churchgoing peers? Has the absence of church made their lives worse? Or are people with troubled lives more likely to stop attending services in the first place? Establishing causation is difficult, but we know that culturally conservative white Americans who are disengaged from church experience less economic success and more family breakdown than those who remain connected, and they grow more pessimistic and resentful. Since the early 1970s, according to W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, rates of religious attendance have fallen more than twice as much among whites without a college degree as among those who graduated college. And even within the white working class, those who don’t regularly attend church are more likely to suffer from divorce, addiction, and financial distress. As Wilcox explains, “Many conservative, Protestant white men who are only nominally attached to a church struggle in today’s world. They have traditional aspirations but often have difficulty holding down a job, getting and staying married, and otherwise forging real and abiding ties in their community. The culture and economy have shifted in ways that have marooned them with traditional aspirations unrealized in their real-world lives.”

The worse Americans fare in their own lives, the darker their view of the country. According to PRRI, white Republicans who seldom or never attend religious services are 19 points less likely than white Republicans who attend at least once a week to say that the American dream “still holds true.”

Media Groupthink

Nate Silver writes that groupthink contributed to the media's inability to foresee the 2016 results.

For starters, American newsrooms are not very diverse along racial or gender lines, and it’s not clear the situation is improving much.6 And in a country where educational attainment is an increasingly important predictor of cultural and political behavior, some 92 percent of journalists have college degrees. A degree didn’t used to be a de facto prerequisite7 for a reporting job; just 70 percent of journalists had college degrees in 1982 and only 58 percent did in 1971.

The political diversity of journalists is not very strong, either. As of 2013, only 7 percent of them identified as Republicans (although only 28 percent called themselves Democrats with the majority saying they were independents). And although it’s not a perfect approximation — in most newsrooms, the people who issue endorsements are not the same as the ones who do reporting — there’s reason to think that the industry was particularly out of sync with Trump. Of the major newspapers that endorsed either Clinton or Trump, only 3 percent (2 of 59) endorsed Trump. By comparison, 46 percent of newspapers to endorse either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney endorsed Romney in 2012. Furthermore, as the media has become less representative of right-of-center views — and as conservatives have rebelled against the political establishment — there’s been an increasing and perhaps self-reinforcing cleavage between conservative news and opinion outlets such as Breitbart and the rest of the media.

Although it’s harder to measure, I’d also argue that there’s a lack of diversity when it comes to skill sets and methods of thinking in political journalism. Publications such as Buzzfeed or (the now defunct) Gawker.com get a lot of shade from traditional journalists when they do things that challenge conventional journalistic paradigms. But a lot of traditional journalistic practices are done by rote or out of habit, such as routinely granting anonymity to staffers to discuss campaign strategy even when there isn’t much journalistic merit in it. Meanwhile, speaking from personal experience, I’ve found the reception of “data journalists” by traditional journalists to be unfriendly, although there have been exceptions.

News Sources in Campaign 2016

Pew reports:

In the coming days, Americans will follow a single event across a variety of media channels: the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States. If the public’s media habits during the campaign are any indicator, it is likely that Trump and Hillary Clinton voters will be learning about the inauguration from very different media outlets. According to a new Pew Research Center survey, Americans who say they voted for Trump in the general election relied heavily on Fox News as their main source of election news leading up to the 2016 election, whereas Clinton voters named an array of different sources, with no one source named by more than one-in-five of her supporters. The survey was conducted Nov. 29-Dec. 12, 2016, among 4,183 adults who are members of Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel.

When voters were asked to write in their “main source” for election news, four-in-ten Trump voters named Fox News.1 The next most-common main source among Trump voters, CNN, was named by only 8% of his voters.

Clinton voters, however, did not coalesce around any one source. CNN was named more than any other, but at 18% had nowhere near the dominance that Fox News had among Trump voters. Instead, the choices of Clinton voters were more spread out. MSNBC, Facebook, local television news, NPR, ABC, The New York Times and CBS were all named by between 5% and 9% of her voters.