President Trump went to Twitter soon after this release to respond to the latest Democrat-media hoax. President Trump was right again. Now we know for certain that this was all another fake news story. Russia Today reported in October that half of the Facbook ads ran after the election and 25% of the ads never ran at all.
Now this... Mark Penn, former chief strategist on Bill Clinton's 1996 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign, and Mrs. Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, admits it's impossible Russian Facebook ads won Donald Trump the White House. Penn uses basic math to dispel the notion that $100,000 of Russian ads would have had any impact of the election outcome.
WSJ reports:
Every day, Americans see hundreds of ads on TV and radio, in newspapers and magazines, on billboards and smartphones. North Americans post to Facebook something like a billion times a day, and during the election many of those messages were about politics. Facebook typically runs about $40 million worth of advertising a day in North America.
Then consider the scale of American presidential elections.
Hillary Clinton's total campaign budget, including associated committees, was $1.4 billion. Mr. Trump and his allies had about $1 billion. Even a full $100,000 of Russian ads would have erased just 0.025% of Hillary's financial advantage. In the last week of the campaign alone, Mrs. Clinton's super PAC dumped $6 million in ads into Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
I have 40 years of experience in politics, and this Russian ad buy, mostly after the election anyway, simply does not add up to a carefully targeted campaign to move voters. It takes tens of millions of dollars to deliver meaningful messages to the contested portion of the electorate. Converting someone who voted for the other party last time is an enormously difficult task. Swing voters in states like Ohio or Florida are typically barraged with 50% or more of a campaign's budget. Try watching TV in those states the week before an election and you will see how jammed the airwaves are.
[Link]
Among a dump truck of other things...