So why won’t the media admit as much? This is the tenth article in a series that opinions information protection of the 2016 common election, explores how Donald Trump won and why his chances had been underrated by many of the American media. Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not despatched a letter to Congress on Oct. 28. The letter, which stated the FBI had "learned of the existence of emails that seem like pertinent to the investigation" into the private e-mail server that Clinton used as secretary of state, upended the information cycle and shortly halved Clinton’s lead within the polls, imperiling her place in the Electoral Faculty. The letter isn’t the only cause that Clinton lost. It does not excuse every resolution the Clinton campaign made. But the effect of those components - say, Clinton’s resolution to give paid speeches to funding banks, or her messaging on pocket-guide issues, or the position that her gender performed within the marketing campaign - is difficult to measure. This art icle has been created by GSA C ontent Gen erator Demoversion!
The affect of Comey’s letter is comparatively easy to quantify, by contrast. At a maximum, it might need shifted the race by three or 4 percentage points toward Donald Trump, swinging Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and chips Florida to him, perhaps along with North Carolina and chips Arizona. At a minimum, its affect might need been only a percentage level or so. Still, because Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than 1 level, the letter was in all probability enough to change the end result of the Electoral Faculty. And yet, from virtually the moment that Trump won the White Home, many mainstream journalists have been in denial in regards to the affect of Comey’s letter. The article that led The brand new York Times’s web site the morning after the election didn't mention Comey or "FBI" even once - a bizarre development considering the dramatic headlines that the Times had given to the letter while the marketing campaign was underway. Books on the marketing campaign have handled Comey’s letter as an incidental factor, beauty in the meantime. Art icle has be en generated by GSA Conte nt Generator DEMO !
And even though Clinton herself has repeatedly introduced up the letter - together with in comments she made at an occasion in New York on Tuesday - many pundits have preferred to alter the dialog when the letter comes up, waving it away instead of debating the deserves of the case. The motivation for this appears fairly clear: If Comey’s letter altered the outcome of the election, the media might have some duty for the outcome. The story dominated news coverage for the higher a part of per week, drowning out different headlines, whether they were adverse for Clinton (such because the news about impending Obamacare premium hikes) or problematic for Trump (reminiscent of his alleged ties to Russia). And but, the story didn’t have a punchline: Two days before the election, Comey disclosed that the emails hadn’t turned up anything new. One can imagine that the Comey letter price Clinton the election with out pondering that the media cost her the election - it was an pressing story that any newsroom had to cowl.
But if the Comey letter had a decisive impact and the story was mishandled by the press - given a disproportionate amount of attention relative to its substantive significance, often with coverage that jumped to conclusions before the facts of the case had been clear - the media needs to grapple with the way it approached the story. Extra sober protection of the story might have yielded a milder voter response. My focus in this series of articles has been on the media’s horse-race coverage quite than its editorial decisions total, however with regards to the Comey letter, this stuff are intertwined. Not only was the letter most likely enough to swing the end result of the horse race, however the reverse can also be true: Perceptions of the horse race most likely affected the best way the story unfolded. Publications may have given hyperbolic protection to the Comey letter in part because they misanalyzed the Electoral College and wrongly concluded that Clinton was a sure thing.
And Comey himself might have released his letter partially due to his overconfidence in Clinton’s possibilities. It’s a mess - so let’s see what we will do to untangle it. Clinton woke up on the morning of Oct. 28 as the probably - under no circumstances sure - next president. Trump had come off a interval of 5 weeks wherein he’d had three erratic debates and numerous girls accuse him of sexual assault after the "Access Hollywood" tape became public. Clinton led by roughly 6 proportion points in nationwide polls and by 6 to 7 points in polls of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Her leads in Florida and North Carolina have been slender, and she was only tied with Trump in Ohio and Iowa.1 But it surely was a reasonably good general position. Her standing was not fairly as protected as it may need appeared from a surface analysis, nevertheless.