Wikileaks may not have hurt Clinton much

[BlackNoir]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/wikileaks-hillary-clinton/

[NaBarney]

"There just isn’t a clean-cut story in the data. For instance, you might have expected a decline in the percentage of Americans who trusted Clinton after Wikileaks began its releases. . . But the percentage of Americans who found Clinton to be honest or trustworthy stayed at around 30 percent in polling throughout October and into November."

 

Maybe she lost because her default trust rating is 30%. I don't see how wikileaks hurt her by revealing things about her campaign that everyone already correctly assumed to be true.

[BlackNoir]

Everyone loves a distraction.  Even when it's an obvious distraction, people can never ignore it.

 

 

[Admin]

I think if anything, she was hurt more by her inability to address the things that came up.  And to be fair - that's a pretty daunting mountain to climb.  I can see it from that perspective of - how paralyzing it can be when - it feels like no matter what you do, you're fucked.

 

But I think she just never really stood up.  For a political wonk, she really didn't even stay "on message" that well.  She just - I don't think any single controversy that came up during the campaign for Clinton was 1/10th as damning as anything that came up for Trump.

 

But every time Trump was confronted with something, he stood up and said "Fuck you".  And sometimes he lied to get out of it, obfuscated, whatever else.  But the main point I think is - he stood up and did something.

 

Clinton just kind of waited and wondered if she should or shouldn't do something, or how much of this she should or shouldn't do and how much of that is too much? and - all that kind of stuff and it just sank her. 

 

So I think in a way, Wikileaks did hurt the Clinton campaign, but only in so much as their responses were always weak.  And part of the issue with that is - it's a fairly weak controversy to begin with.  So - if you can't stand up to a weak controversy, even as your opponent is standing up very strongly to much worse controversies, I think that could have had an effect on voters.

 

It wasn't Wikileaks so much as the campaigns fairly weak and inconsistent response to Wikileaks. 

 

And Wikileaks in and of itself was basically nothing.  There wasn't really anything in there substantively that should have caused a candidate to stumble that badly. 

 

The only reason Clinton campaign opponents were able to leverage the issue is because the Clinton campaign did a terrible job of handling it.