I want to know how "colluding" with the Russians could have influenced peoples votes.
"Oh I saw an ad on Facebook that says Hillary is bad, they can't put anything on Facebook that isn't true so I'm voting for Trump." Are there actually people that would think this? Did a facebook ad change anyone's vote?
THIS is what I don't get.
A campaign does EXACTLY this. EXACTLY. It promotes advertising, newspaper pieces, Facebook pages, tv ads, radio ads, signs, billboards to do precisely ONE thing:
To get a voter to vote for them. And in America, where we largely have a two-party system, it almost always includes telling you bad things about the other guy.
And ads are targeted - they don't always run the same ad in Pennsylvania that they do in California. They run some ads at special demographics they think will tip an election -
so if an election is tight, and you can tip a handful of independents, or a larger percentage of a supporting minority or religious group - if you can take measures to make SURE
these people GET to the polls - you will win.
Trump - and Hillary - spent BILLIONS on this. BILLIONS. Even the most optimistic estimates show that Russians or any other group spent the tiniest fraction of that.
If you spend a hundred bucks to be elected class president, and I spend a nickel on the other guy - and the other guy wins - and you honest to God believe that NICKEL made the difference -
you're either the world's biggest idiot for believing it, or the world's biggest idiot for not hiring **ME** the next time around, because I can make miracles happen.
Because you can spend outrageous piles of cash, hire massive numbers of campaign workers, spread out over every part of the nation - and you were undone by a handful of nitwits
with a laptop.