Election interference by foreigners
An assessment
Last Thursday, President Donald Trump rendered his highly-touted prime time speech about how foreigners, particularly the Chinese, have been interested in intervening in US political campaigns. Although promising “shocking” revelations, the speech has been broadly attacked for mainly recycling already-debunked charges that Trump has previously repeatedly made and for the fact that the documents that the president grandly released to support his case often refute his charges. Reportedly, Trump was actually advised by trusted insiders not to make the speech because it recycled old charges that no longer were of much interest to the public.
But the public discussion has neglected two central issues.
The efficacy of election interference on the vote
One involves a neglect to assess the impact of foreign meddling on the actual vote. Essentially, Trump’s argument effectively maintains that foreign interference is unjustified and indeed diabolical in part because American voters, in their blissful and heart-warming innocence, can readily be manipulated by the occasional spurious social media post. However, for the most part, colorful anecdotes aside, election interference, like election advertising more generally, is an exercise in futility.
From birth, Americans are regularly deluged by advertising and marketing campaigns, overt and covert, about how to spend their money. In all cases, those petitioned remain free to ignore the ads, and most become quite good at it. If extensive promotion could guarantee success, Americans would all be driving Edsels and drinking New Coke—legendary marketing failures in 1958 and 1985 by two of the (otherwise) most successful businesses in history: the Ford Motor Company and Coca-Cola. More broadly, studies find that upwards of 90 percent of new products fail to sell despite massive promotion campaigns.
This holds as well for campaign information. In general, political campaigns, as anyone who has suffered through one knows, are wall-to-wall fake news as incumbents strategically distort their record in office and their challengers do the same in reverse. With more participants, foreign or otherwise, the fake news heap simply becomes higher and deeper. As political scientist Diana Mutz points out, “the scholarly consensus” on the degree to which campaign advertising shifts votes is that the impact “is marginal at most.” A more recent study assesses 49 field experiments and concludes that “the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero.”
For the most part, people tend to believe what they want to believe, and their preferences tend to manipulate candidates more than candidates manipulate them. In fact, a principal goal of campaigning is to determine which issues voters are concerned about, not to create those issues. Thus in 2016, Donald Trump discovered that Japan-bashing no longer generated a big response, but China-bashing did.
During that presidential campaign, there were attempts by Russian hackers (not Chinese ones) to undermine Hillary Clinton. Although Clinton still handily won the popular vote, many analysts argued that digital interlopers had sought to undermine the integrity of U.S. elections and perhaps democracy itself. However, the Russian contribution to a flood of misinformation in the 2016 presidential election was tiny. On Facebook, where most of the manipulation supposedly took place, Moscow’s intervention totaled perhaps a fraction one percent of the content on the platform’s news feed. And much of this was wasted because the people who embraced the information were already committed to a particular party or lived in states that went solidly for one or the other candidate. Moreover, Facebook users are scarcely the most politically attuned: over any period of three months, only four percent of them click on an opinion piece. Indeed, Russia’s efforts proved to be wildly counterproductive. Instead of weakening U.S. policy, Moscow generated bipartisan support for anti-Russian sanctions when the two U.S. political parties could agree on little else.
Kathleen Hall Jamison has studied Russian efforts in the 2016 election campaign. Subtitled “How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President,” her study finds that the Russians probably did “help” albeit, it seems, only by increasing the size of the heap: their efforts scarcely seem to have been decisive. The problem is that, as Jamieson acknowledges, “we have no good way to isolate the effects of troll-generated and hacked content from multiple other sources and forms of electoral communication” including, for example, the barrage of campaign advertising and news coverage, the effect of the various missteps of the Clinton campaign, peculiarities in turnout rates (and the weather), and the attractions of third-party candidates (who garnered five percent of the total vote in that election).
The Russians seem to have had less than 100 people working as trolls—most of them college students or recent graduates. They were required to watch “House of Cards” on Netflix to enhance (or establish) an understanding of American politics, and they were devoted to seeking to shake things up by posting on controversial subjects more than trying directly to support one candidate or the other. Said one troll: “we were just having fun.”
Hackers, apparently from Russia, also had fun getting into electronic mail connected with the Democratic National Committee. One dump of this information embarrassingly showed that Committee leaders, who were supposed to be neutral on who the party candidate for president would be, were decidedly in favor of Clinton—a revelation of almost stupefying banality to anyone who knows about American politics. Another dump showed that Clinton, like every other politician in the history of the planet, was capable to saying one thing to one group and another to another.
In all, Russia’s cyber invasion scarcely seems to present a cosmic threat. And American democracy is entirely likely to survive.
American hypocrisy
The second concern involves issues about hypocrisy. Over the decades, the United States has been assiduously intervening in foreign elections (always, of course, with the best of intentions). For example, in the late 1950s, fearing the growing popularity of the Japanese Socialist Party, the United States provided millions of dollars in secret campaign funds to opposition politicians.
As a public service, Michael Brenner of the University of Pittsburgh, has, with a little help from his friends, provided a list of countries where the United States has intervened in elections. Going back a few decades, his list includes Greece, Turkey, Italy, France, and Portugal. More recently there have been Macedonia, Serbia, Albania, Bosnia, Ukraine, Russia (especially Yeltsin’s 1995-96 campaign), Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine, Cyprus, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Yemen, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Congo and several other countries in Africa, and, in Latin America, every country multiple times including within the last fifteen years Haiti, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina. Brenner’s list does not include Canada, but just possibly there are some Canadians who might find that omission to be unjustified.
Indeed, a more extensive study demonstrates that, over the centuries, intervention by major countries in foreign elections has been common, even routine, though the evidence strongly suggests that overt interventions are much more likely to be effective than covert efforts like campaign meddling.
Trump’s speech
There are a couple of other considerations about Trump’s speech.
One involves concerns about why he made it all. As noted, advice from insiders was that the public was no longer very interested in his repeated claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that, without various forms of election interference, he would have won in a “landslide.” Normally, as even his many detractors will acknowledge, Trump is highly and acutely sensitive to assessing and serving voter’s whims. But that proclivity was not evident here. Indeed, his continued and amplified obsession with the issue of election interference may give support to opponents who stress what they deem to be his intellectual decline.
And the other involves the China-bashing that permeates the speech. As noted, Russia-bashing, however outdated, might have been acceptable since the Russian clearly have made (predictably futile) efforts to manipulate American elections. But, although Trump tried to stress China’s diabolical efforts at election interference, his speech mainly simply stressed China’s gathering of publicly-available information on the American election process—as the Chinese were quick to point out. Moreover, once an ardent and effective China-basher, his own behavior demonstrates that China-bashing no longer sells well. Possibly operative in his consideration was something of a felt political necessity to soften his critique of Russia’s Vladimir Putin after (correctly) labeling the Putin-authored war in Ukraine as “stupid” and “ridiculous.”
For more extensive analysis many of these issues, click here.