by Jill Lepore
Seventeen candidates had vied for the Republican nomination. At the debrief, the campaign managers talked about their candidates and the campaign the way jockeys talk about their horses, and the conditions on the race track. “Our strategy was to keep our head down,” said Florida senator Marco Rubio’s manager. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s manager said, “The path was going to be the long game.” Ted Cruz’s manager talked about what lane his horse was racing in. Trump’s former campaign manager, CNN analyst Corey Lewandowski, spoke the longest. His horse was the best, the prettiest, the fastest, and ran “the most unconventional race in the history of the presidency.” He told a story, likely apocryphal, about how in 2012 Mitt Romney had been driven in a limo to campaign events but then, at the last minute, he’d jump into a Chevy. Not Trump. Trump went everywhere in his jet. “Our goal was to make sure we were going to run as the populist, to run on our wealth and not run from it, and to monopolize the media attention by using social media unlike anybody else,” Lewandowski gloated. “What we know is that when Donald Trump put out a tweet, Fox News would cover it live.” Field organizing was over, he said. Newspapers, newspaper advertisements? Irrelevant, he said. “Donald Trump buys ink by the television station,” he said. Trump hadn’t run in any lane. Trump had run from a plane.148
South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham’s manager pointed out that much had turned on Fox News’s decision to use polls to determine who participated in the primary debates, and where each candidate would stand on the stage, and how much camera time each candidate would get. In the 2016 election, the polls had been a scandal of near Dewey-Beats-Truman proportion, a scandal that people in the industry had seen coming. During the 2012 presidential election, twelve hundred polling organizations had conducted thirty-seven thousand polls by making more than three billion phone calls. Most Americans—more than 90 percent—had refused to speak to them. Mitt Romney’s pollsters had believed, even on the morning of the election, that Romney would win. A 2013 study—a poll—found that three out of four Americans distrusted polls. But nine of ten people, presumably, distrusted the polls so much that they had refused to answer the question, which meant that the results of that poll meant nothing at all.149
“Election polling is in near crisis,” a past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research had written just months before the 2016 election. When George Gallup founded the polling industry in the 1930s, the response rate—the number of people who answer a pollster as a percentage of those who are asked—was well above 90. By the 1980s, it had fallen to about 60 percent. By the election of 2016, the response rate had dwindled to the single digits. Time and again, predictions failed. In 2015, polls failed to predict Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory in Israel, the Labour Party’s loss in the United Kingdom, and a referendum in Greece. In 2016, polls failed to predict Brexit, the vote to withdraw Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union.150
The more unreliable the polls became, the more the press and the parties relied on them, which only made them less reliable. In 2015, during the primary season, Fox News announced that, in order to participate in its first prime-time debate, Republican candidates had to “place in the top 10 of an average of the five most recent national polls,” and that where the candidates would be placed on the debate stage would be determined by their polling numbers. (Standing in the polls had earlier been used to exclude third-party candidates from debates—a practice that had led to a raft of complaints filed with the Federal Election Commission—but not major-party candidates.) The Republican National Committee didn’t object, but the decision had alarmed reputable polling organizations. The Marist Institute for Public Opinion called the Fox News plan “a bad use of public polls.” Scott Keeter, Pew’s director of Survey Research, said, “I just don’t think polling is really up to the task of deciding the field for the headliner debate.” Pew, Gallup, and the Wall Street Journal/NBC pollsters refused to participate.151
Polls admitted Trump into the GOP debates, polls placed him at center stage, and polls declared him the winner. “Donald J. Trump Dominates Time Poll,” the Trump campaign posted on its website following the first debate, referring to a story in which Time reported that 47 percent of respondents to a survey it had conducted said that Trump had won. Time’s “poll” was conducted by PlayBuzz, a viral content provider that embedded “quizzes, polls, lists and other playful formats” onto websites to attract traffic. PlayBuzz collected about seventy thousand “votes” from visitors to Time’s website in its instant opt-in Internet poll. Time posted this warning: “The results of this poll are not scientific.”152 Less reputable websites did not bother with disclaimers.
Efforts to call attention to the weakness of the polls, or to make distinctions between one kind of poll and another, were both unsuccessful and halfhearted. The New York Times ran a story called “Presidential Polls: How to Avoid Getting Fooled.” Polls drove polls. Good polls drove polls, and bad polls drove polls and when bad polls drove good polls, they weren’t so good anymore. Then, too, warning their readers, listeners, or viewers about the problems with polls hadn’t prevented news organizations from compounding them. In August 2015, the day after the first GOP debate, Slate published a column called “Did Trump Actually Win the Debate? How to Understand All Those Instant Polls That Say Yes,” even as Slate conducted its own instant poll: “Now that the first Republican presidential debate is over, pundits and politicos will be gabbing about what it all means for each candidate’s campaign. Who triumphed? Who floundered? Who will ride the debate to electoral glory, and who is fated to fizzle?” They made the same populist promises Gallup had made in the 1930s. “TV talking heads won’t decide this election,” promised Slate’s pollster (whose title was “Interactives Editor”). “The American people will.”153
Every major polling organization miscalled the 2016 election, predicting a win for Hillary Clinton. It had been a narrow contest. Clinton won the popular vote; Trump won in the Electoral College. The Kennedy School post-election debrief served as one of the earliest formal reckonings with what, exactly, had happened.
After the Republican campaign managers finished taking stock, the Democrats spoke. “Hillary, a lot of people don’t recall, came to electoral politics late in her career,” her campaign manager, Robby Mook, said. “She got her start with the Children’s Defense Fund . . .” Clinton’s campaign had failed to say much of anything new about Hillary Clinton, a candidate Americans knew only too well. Mook apparently had little to add. Bernie Sanders’s manager looked wan. He shook his head. “We almost did it.”154
The more obvious explanations for Clinton’s loss went, on the whole, unstated. Obama had failed to raise up a new generation of political talent. The Democratic National Committee, believing Clinton’s nomination and even her victory to be inevitable, had suppressed competition. Clinton, dedicating her time to fund-raising with wealthy coastal liberals from Hollywood to the Hamptons, failed to campaign in swing states and hardly bothered to speak to blue-collar white voters. After Trump won the nomination, she failed to do much of anything except to call out his flaws of character, even though Trump’s most vocal supporters had pointed out, from the very beginning, that a call-out approach would fail.
The Clinton campaign believed Trump’s political career had come to an end when an audio recording was leaked in which he said that the best way to approach women was to “grab ’em by the pussy.” But even this hadn’t stopped conservative Christians from supporting him. “Although the media tried to portray Trump’s personality as a cult of personality, ironically, the one thing voters weren’t wild about was his personality,” wrote Ann Coulter, in In Trump We Trust, a hastily written campaign polemic that, like her earlier work, waved aside even the vaguest interest in evidence: “I’m too busy to footnote.” As for charges of Trump’s depravity and deceit, Coulter rightly predicted that his supporters would be untroubled: “There’s nothing Trump can do that won’t be forgiven,” she wrot
e. “Except change his immigration policies.”155
Phyllis Schlafly, the grande dame of American conservatism, had provided Trump with one of his earliest and most important endorsements, at a rally in St. Louis in March of 2016. At ninety-one, her voice quavered but her powers were undiminished. In a pink blazer, her blond bouffant as flawless as ever, she told the crowd that Trump was a “true conservative.” Trump, to Schlafly, represented the culmination of a movement she had led for so long, from the anticommunist crusade of the 1950s and the Goldwater campaign of the 1960s to STOP ERA in the 1970s and the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s. Since 9/11, Schlafly had been calling for an end to immigration, and for a fence along the border, and Trump’s call for a wall had won her loyalty. “Donald Trump is the one who has made immigration the big issue that it really is,” Schlafly said. “Because Obama wants to change the character of our country.”156
That summer, Schlafly had attended the Republican National Convention to celebrate Trump’s historic nomination. In a wheelchair, she looked weak and pale and yet she spoke with her trademark determination. She said she wanted to be remembered for “showing that the grassroots can rise up and defeat the establishment, because that’s what we did with the Equal Rights Amendment, and I think that’s what we’re going to do with electing Donald Trump.” Schlafly died only weeks later, on September 5, 2016. Her endorsement, The Conservative Case for Trump, published the day after her death, called on conservative Christians to support Trump because of his positions on immigration and abortion: “Christianity is under attack around the world—most dramatically from Islamists, but also insidiously here at home with attacks on religious freedom.”157
Only weeks before the election, Trump delivered the opening remarks at Schlafly’s funeral, at a gothic cathedral in St. Louis. “With Phyllis, it was America first,” said Trump from the altar. He raised a finger, as if making a vow: “We will never, ever let you down.” On Election Day, at least according to exit polls, 52 percent of Catholics and 81 percent of evangelicals voted for Trump.158
Trump’s election marked a last and abiding victory for the woman who stopped the ERA. Yet dissenting conservative Christians argued that it also marked the end of Christian conservatism. “Though Donald Trump won the presidency in part with the strong support of Catholics and evangelicals, the idea that someone as robustly vulgar, fiercely combative, and morally compromised as Trump will be an avatar for the restoration of Christian morality and social unity is beyond delusional,” wrote Rod Dreher after the election. “He is not a solution to the problem of America’s cultural decline, but a symptom of it.”159
Dreher called on Christians to engage in “digital fasting as an ascetic practice.” Other conservatives who had not supported Trump wrestled with the consequences of the right-wing attack on traditional sources of authority and knowledge but especially the press. “We had succeeded in convincing our audiences to ignore and discount any information whatsoever from the mainstream media,” former conservative talk radio host Charlie Sykes reported after the election, in an act of apostasy called How the Right Lost Its Mind.160
The Left placed blame elsewhere. Hillary Clinton mainly attributed her defeat to a scandal over her email, for which she blamed the FBI, though she and her supporters also blamed Bernie Sanders, for dividing the Democratic Party.161 At the Kennedy School post-election conference, neither the Clinton campaign nor the mainstream media was ready to reckon with its role in the election. At an after-dinner discussion about the role of the media in the election. Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN, rebuffed every suggestion that CNN might have made mistakes in its coverage—for instance, in the amount of airtime it gave to Trump, including long stretches when, waiting for the candidate to appear somewhere, the network broadcast footage of an empty stage. “Frankly, respectfully, I think that’s bullshit,” Zucker said of the complaints. “Donald Trump was on CNN a lot. That’s because we asked him to do interviews and he agreed to do them. We continuously asked the other candidates to come on and do interviews and they declined.”162
“You showed empty podiums!” someone hollered from the audience. Zucker refused to back down. “Donald Trump was asked to come on, and he agreed to come on, and he took the questions. These other candidates were asked—”
“That’s not true!” screamed another campaign manager.
Zucker: “I understand that emotions continue to run high. . . .”163
The moderator, Bloomberg Politics writer Sasha Issenberg, called for calm. “Let’s move to a less contentious subject—fake news.”164
During the campaign, voters who got their news online had been reading a great many stories that were patently untrue, pure fictions, some of them written by Russian propagandists. Russian president Vladimir Putin disliked Clinton; Trump admired Putin. During Trump’s first year in office, Congress would investigate whether the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russian government, and even whether the meddling affected the outcome of the election, but the meddling, which appeared to consist of stoking partisan fires and igniting racial and religious animosity, had a larger aim: to destroy Americans’ faith in one another and in their system of government.165
In any event, not all writers of fake news were Russians. Paul Horner, a thirty-seven-year-old aspiring comedian from Phoenix, wrote fake pro-Trump news for profit, and was amazed to find that Trump staff like Lewandowski reposted his stories on social media. “His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact,” Horner told the Washington Post. “Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.” Horner, who did not support Trump, later said, “All the stories I wrote were to make Trump’s supporters look like idiots for sharing my stories.” (Horner died not long after the election, possibly of a drug overdose.)166
Horner may have been surprised that people reposted his hoaxes as news, but a great deal of reposting was done not by people but by robots. In the months before the election, Twitter had as many as 48 million fake accounts, bots that tweeted and retweeted fake news. On Facebook, a fake news story was as likely as a real news story to be posted in Facebook’s News Feed.167
At the Kennedy School forum, moderator Issenberg turned to Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of global communications, marketing, and public policy.
“At what point did you recognize there was a problem with fake news?” Issenberg asked.
“The issue of our role as a news dissemination organization is something that really surfaced over the course of the past year,” Schrage said.168
Congress would subsequently conduct an investigation into what Facebook knew, and when it knew it, and why it didn’t do more about it.169 Mark Zuckerberg, who appeared to be exploring the possibility of some day running for president of the United States, had at first dismissed the notion that Facebook played any role in the election as “crazy.” During a subsequent congressional investigation, Facebook would reluctantly admit that a Kremlin-linked misinformation organization, the Internet Research Agency, whose objective was to divide Americans and interfere with the election, had bought inflammatory political ads from Facebook that had been seen by more than 126 million Americans.170 It later came out that Facebook had provided the private data of more than 87 million of its users to Cambridge Analytica, a data firm retained by the Trump campaign.
Schrage, however, didn’t speak to any of that. Facebook had only very recently begun to wonder whether it ought to think of itself as a “news organization”—“I’d say probably in the last three or six months,” he explained—and it showed. Schrage, a corporate lawyer who specialized in acquisitions and mergers, displayed little evidence of any particular understanding of news, reporting, editing, editorial judgment, or the public interest. When he dithered about photographs with nipples that Facebook’s algorithms had classified as pornography, but which might really be legitimate news stories, the Associated Press’s Kathleen Carroll interjected witheringly.171
“Can I ju
st say that news judgment is a lot more complicated than nipples?”172
Schrage shrank in his chair.
At the start of Trump’s second year in office, the Justice Department would indict thirteen Russian nationals involved with the Internet Research Agency, charging them with “posing as U.S. persons and creating false U.S. persons,” as well as using “the stolen identities of real U.S. persons” to operate and post on social media accounts “for purposes of interfering with the U.S. political system,” a strategy that included “supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump . . . and disparaging Hillary Clinton.” They were also charged with undermining the campaigns of Republican candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, supporting the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, using Facebook and Twitter to sow political dissent in forms that included fake Black Lives Matter and American Muslim social media accounts, and organizing pro-Trump, anti-Clinton rallies, posting under hashtags that included #Trump2016, #TrumpTrain, #IWontProtectHillary and #Hillary4Prison.173 More revelations would follow.
At the post-election panel, Issenberg asked Marty Baron, esteemed editor of the Washington Post, whether he had considered not publishing the content of Democratic National Committee emails released by WikiLeaks, an anonymous source site established in 2006. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian computer programmer, styled himself after Daniel Ellsberg, the political scientist who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, but Assange, living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, bore not the remotest resemblance to Ellsberg. Russian hackers had broken into the DNC’s servers, Assange had released the hacked emails on WikiLeaks, and the Post was among the media outlets that decided to quote from emails that would turn out to have been hacked by a sovereign nation-state.174