WaPo: Russia paid for Facebook ads encouraging Bernie supporters not to vote last November

[Tom Rinaldo]

75. Have what? That the sun rises in the morning and sets at night?

What percentage of the total voting electorate do you believe are well informed on both the issues and the candidates? There were almost 130 million voters in the 2016 election. I would guess of those that perhaps 30 million could be considered highly informed voters. From what I know about how much good information the general public tends to absorb, I assume that there were more poorly informed voters than there were highly informed voters who participated.For the sake of discussion I'll guess 50 million of those.

Poorly informed voters come in every stripe, every age group, every race, every gender and with every ideological leaning. Some "don't trust men", some "don't trust women", some vote based on "gut feelings", some vote based on who "seems presidential" some on who "isn't part of the establishment" etc. etc. People are gullible when they are ill informed. There were millions of ill informed people who initially supported Trump, millions who supported Bernie, millions who supported Hillary etc.

Political parties, especially Republicans but not exclusively, try to manipulate ill informed voters by pushing their hot buttons. It goes on all the time. This time around the Russians took part in that too. That doesn't happen all the time, at least it didn't until now. So yeah Russia interfered in our election, and since they wanted to help Trump, they tried to disillusion voters who did not support Trump into staying home rather than voting against him. People who preferred Bernie to Hillary would of course be targeted. If the Russians had been active in our elections in 2008, and had they preferred McCain over Obama then, they would have been using the social media of that time to turn off disgruntled ill informed Clinton voters into staying home rather than voting for Obama. That was a subgroup of voters during the 2008 election that already existed with or without Russian interference.

During the primaries some of us were pointing out that Bernie was doing better with Independents than Hillary was. That included some pissed off people who didn't like the way things were going in their lives who blamed the establishment for every failing. Many of those viewed Hillary as the establishment. Not necessarily for her political views, but just because she has been a high profile political figure for decades. Of that group, some leaned toward Bernie for "change", others toward Trump for "change". I never considered the first group as real Bernie supporters, just votes that Bernie probably could win for Democrats in the general election that Hillary might have trouble with. She did as it turns out, and the Russians helped make sure that she did.

And you know what? I have no doubt that the Russians are still doing all that they can to destabilize our elections and Democratic system. One easy way for them to go about that is to now try to drive wedges into the Democratic coalition by inflaming tensions between those who are more drawn to Hillary than Bernie, or vice versa. I suggest that we all take no part in making that easier for them to accomplish.