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The Comey Effect

What happened in the homestretch that caused so many voters to turn away from me?

First, and most importantly, there was the unprecedented intervention by then FBI Director Jim Comey.

His October 28 letter about the investigation into my emails led to a week of wall-to-wall negative coverage. A look at five of the nation’s top newspapers found that together they published 100 stories mentioning the email controversy in the days after Comey’s letter, nearly half of them on the front page. In six out of seven mornings from October 29 to November 4, it was the lead story in the nation’s news cycle. Trump understood that Comey’s apparent imprimatur gave his “Crooked Hillary” attacks new credibility, and Republicans dumped at least $17 million in Comey-related ads into the battleground states. It worked.

On November 1 and 2, my campaign conducted focus groups with independent, swing voters in Philadelphia and Tampa, Florida. The undecideds weren’t ready to jump to Trump yet, but in retrospect, the warning signs were blinking red. “I have concerns about this whole Weiner thing. I find it unsettling. I had been leaning toward Hillary, but now I just don’t know,” said one Florida voter. “I was never a fan of either one, but this email thing with Clinton has me concerned the past few days. Will they elect her and then impeach her? Was she giving away secret information?” said another.

Outside focus groups were hearing similar things. Researchers who track what consumers are talking about, essentially a word-of-mouth index, found “a sudden change,” with a 17-point drop in net sentiment for me, and an 11-point rise for Trump. According to Brad Fay of Engagement Labs, which applies well-established consumer research techniques to study elections, “The change in word-of-mouth favorability metric was stunning, and much greater than the traditional opinion polling revealed.”

Those concerns we heard in the focus groups help explain why Comey’s letter was so devastating. From the beginning of the general election, we had understood the race to be a contest between voters’ fear of risk and desire for change. Convincing Americans that electing Trump was just too big a risk was our best shot at overpowering the widespread desire for a change after eight years of Democratic control. In demographic terms, our strategy depended on compensating for expected weakness with working-class white voters (a trend that had been getting worse for Democrats for a long time) by doing better among college-educated suburban moderates—precisely the people most likely to be concerned about risk.

Before October 28, there was every reason to believe this strategy would work. Voters thought Trump was unqualified and temperamentally unfit. They worried he might blunder into a war. And they thought I was steady, qualified, and safe. Comey’s letter turned that picture upside down. Now voters were worried my presidency would be dogged by more investigations, maybe even impeachment. It was “unsettling,” as that Florida voter put it. When both candidates seemed risky, then the desire for change reasserted itself and undecideds shifted to Trump or a third party.

In the week that followed Comey’s letter, Nate Silver found that my lead in national polling dropped by about 3 points, and my chances of winning the election shrunk from 81 percent to 65 percent. In the average battleground state, my lead was down to just 1.7 points—and the fact that there were few if any polls still in the field that late in the game in places such as Wisconsin meant that the damage could easily have been worse.

Then, on the Sunday afternoon before Election Day, Comey sent another letter explaining that, in fact, there was no new evidence to change his conclusion from July. By then it was too late. If anything, that second letter may have energized Trump supporters even more and made them more likely to turn out and vote against me. It also guaranteed that undecided voters saw two more days of headlines about emails and investigations.

Hours after Comey’s second letter hit the news, Trump whipped up the outrage in a rally in Michigan: “Hillary Clinton is guilty. She knows it. The FBI knows it. The people know it,” he said. “Now it’s up to the American people to deliver justice at the ballot box on November 8.” The crowd responded with loud chants of “Lock her up!”

Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, credited Comey’s letter with reversing his candidate’s fortunes. “With eleven days to go in this election cycle something amazing happened,” he said. In his new book, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, Bloomberg News reporter Joshua Green reveals that the Trump campaign’s data scientists thought the effect of Comey’s letter was “pivotal.” In an internal memo written five days before Election Day, they reported seeing “declining support for Clinton, shifting in favor of Mr. Trump” and predicted, “This may have a fundamental impact on the results.” Sadly, they were right.

Silver, whose model had been more conservative than most throughout the race, concluded, “Clinton would almost certainly be President-Elect if the election had been held on Oct. 27 (the day before the Comey letter).” Professor Sam Wang, who runs the Princeton Election Consortium, called Comey’s letter “a critical factor in the home stretch” and found a 4-point swing.

Here’s a particularly stark way of understanding the impact: Even if Comey caused just 0.6 percent of Election Day voters to change their votes, and even if that swing only occurred in the Rust Belt, it would have been enough to shift the Electoral College from me to Trump.

This is why Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times columnist, has started ironically tweeting “Thanks, Comey,” every time he sees some new outrage from the Trump White House. Comey made a choice to excoriate me in public in July and then dramatically reopen the investigation on October 28, all while refusing to say a word about Trump and Russia. If not for those decisions, everything would have been different. Comey himself later said that he was “mildly nauseous” at the idea that he influenced the outcome of the election. Hearing that made me sick.