Thanks Comey
by digby
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| One little acknowledged reason he fired him is because he hates the idea that his win was a fluke |
The New York Times’ David Leonhardt:
The polling analysts who worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had a name for the many Americans who didn’t like him but didn’t like Hillary Clinton either: “double haters.”
Many of these double haters seemed likely to vote anyway, given their long voting history. “They were a sizable bloc,” Joshua Green writes in his new book “Devil’s Bargain,” the first deeply insightful political narrative of the Trump era, “3 to 5 percent of the 15 million voters across 17 battleground states.”
The double haters spent much of the campaign unsure what to do. In the end, as Green told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross last week, “they broke to Trump.” As part of his reporting for the book, Green got access to internal polls and memos from the Trump campaign, and this material makes clear that Trump’s aides believed one factor made a bigger difference than any other.
It was the memo that James Comey, then the F.B.I. director, released about Clinton’s emails on Oct. 28.
The memo, Green says, “got them to come out, not to support Trump but essentially to vote against Hillary, which in the end was the same thing.”
We knew this because the Trump campaign pollsters talked about it after the election. But nobody wanted to hear it then and I suspect nobody wants to hear it now.
Still, for the record, Comey’s bombshell did make the difference.
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